Massachusetts Physician Group Improves Patient Experience

Massachusetts Health Quality Partners, convening member of the AF4Q alliance from Greater Boston, Massachusetts, was recently featured in a study by the Rand Corporation about the impact physician practices have made and continue to make in regards to patient experience. The study details MHQP’s efforts in measurement and reporting of patient satisfaction, and its strides toward connecting low- scoring doctors with means in which to raise their score. For example, since 2005, MHQP has conducted surveys with more than 200,000 patients statewide in order to determine levels of patient satisfaction. In 2008 the Rand Corporation, with support from The Commonwealth Fund, then polled physicians in order to determine whether this data had been used to improve the quality of care provided by practitioners. The study found “61 percent of the medical groups reported attempting group-wide improvement efforts based on the patient assessments, 22 percent reported efforts to improve only the performance of low-scoring physicians, and 17 percent reported no improvement efforts.” The full article has been recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, and you can find the full press release is available here.