Urban Safety Net Hospitals Fair Poorly on Patient Surveys, Study Finds

Mandatory patient satisfaction surveys are one of the measures introduced by the Affordable Care Act to move away from the fee-for-service to a value-based healthcare system. CMS uses patient satisfaction scores to determine reimbursement levels to hospitals.

A team of researchers at Mount Sinai Health System, evaluated survey results from 3907 hospitals across the country and found that large health systems that serve population-dense urban regions with a patient population of lower socioeconomic status, fare worse on these surveys. The authors evaluated the data to identify statistical links between patients’ perceptions of their care and demographic factors outside the control of individual hospitals.

Two variables that had a high impact on the scores were hospital size and English as a second language. The authors went ahead and developed an adjustment formula to account for the inequities in the scores. “When this adjustment formula was applied to all New York State Hospitals, three large, urban academic medical centers — NY Presbyterian, Montefiore and Mount Sinai – moved into the top 10 in ranking,” according to one of the study authors. The article has been published in The Journal of Hospital Medicine.

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