When Physicians Have To Say No: Does Patient Satisfaction Suffer?
The short answer: No.
At least not in the context of a strong physician-patient relationship.
Many physicians have legitimate concerns about the prospects of having their salary or level reimbursement linked to patient satisfaction. I would too given the way most health care providers go about measuring and interpreting patient satisfaction data.
A major concern of physicians is the issue of patient requests – particularly the impact of unfulfilled (and unreasonable) requests upon patient satisfaction. According to researchers, explicit patient requests for medications, diagnostic tests and specialty referrals occur in between 25% to 40% of primary care visits. This figure is much higher when requests for information are factored in. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Mind The Gap*