Patient delivery of care satisfaction surveys have emerged as instruments to assess the quality of health care at both the hospital and provider levels. We evaluated the correlation between these care satisfaction surveys and patient-reported outcomes (PROs).
We reviewed secondary data on 540 patients with 540 random visits who underwent primary total joint arthroplasty between January 2014 and February 2017. The Press Ganey Outpatient Medical Practice Survey was collected from outpatient clinical encounters to measure patient satisfaction with their experience and matched to PRO measures from the same encounter. The PROs evaluated included the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System physical function computerized adaptive test, v1.2, and the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System Global 10 health survey. In addition to the random selection, we reviewed separate cross-sections of the data including preoperative visits within 90 days of the index procedure, all postoperative visits at least 1 year from the index procedure, and the magnitude of change in PRO scores from preoperative to a minimum 1-year postoperative visit. Data were evaluated using the Spearman correlation coefficient (rs).
There was little if any correlation between the Press Ganey scores and PROs at all time points evaluated (all, rs: −0.13 to 0.14). When evaluating knee and hip arthroplasty cases separately, the data demonstrated similar results (all, rs: −0.33 to 0.18).
We found little, if any, correlation between a patient’s satisfaction with their care experience and their own perception of physical function and global health measures at all time points evaluated. These data question the utility of these scores as surrogate measures of health care quality, especially when reimbursements become tied to these metrics.