Press Ganey Mantra: Suck It Up

“It’s a case of good intentions gone badly awry – and it’s only getting worse.” Prophetic words in a Forbes Magazine article by Kai Falkenberg titled “Why Rating Your Doctor Is Bad For Your Health.” According to the article, Survey “response rates have been dramatically declining over the past decade,” says Paul Alexander Clark, founder of SmartPatient, a health care analytics company. He should know: Until 2007 Clark was in charge of Press Ganey’s patient-satisfaction improvement group. The response rates, he says, are now “too low to produce reliable results.” Insiders have known this for a decade. “This is a dirty little secret in our industry,” a senior Gallup executive wrote in a 2002 letter to the CMS chief. “At those levels the standard rules of probability don’t exist. … This means you may or may not be tracking real patient attitudes.” The article also states that “flawed survey methods and the decisions they induce, produce billions more in waste.” That’s $280 billion in waste according to estimates in the article. Wasted money so that hospitals don’t lose a percentage of their Medicare payments – government cuts which will total $1 – 2 billion under government mandates geared to save money. The thing is that a substantial portion of the $280 billion will be paid for care to Medicare and Medicaid patients. So the government is paying out a large percentage of $280 billion for inc...
Source: WhiteCoat's Call Room - Category: Emergency Medicine Doctors Authors: Tags: Press Ganey Source Type: blogs