Medical Practice Top Improvers - A Client Resource of Innovation and Best Practices By CHG guest authors Laura Lindberg, Knowledge Manager, Press Ganey Associates, Inc. Stephanie Holmes, Knowledge Management, Press Ganey Associates, Inc. 800.232.8032 • pressganey.com • March 2007

Thanks to technological advancements and increased access to capital, physicians can perform complex procedures in medical clinics that formerly required a hospital visit.
Medical clinics serve the patient's comprehensive needs, from routine check-ups to specialty care.

As medical care continues to trend toward outpatient treatment, it is important to focus on what outpatient clinics are doing well so the successes can be duplicated elsewhere. Press Ganey Associates, Inc., the health care industry's leading vendor of satisfaction measurement and improvement services, offers insight to care providers and medical practice managers on areas identified for industry-wide improvement.

Press Ganey analyzed the experiences of patients treated at 5,419 medical clinics nationwide between January 1, 2001 and December 31, 2005. Patient response data was analyzed to distinguish which facilities made significant changes, with an increase in mean score points, over that four-year time period. The data was broken out in six-month intervals to pinpoint the facilities that had made consistent improvements. Through the survey process, Press Ganey identified medical practice top improvers.

While it is typical for Press Ganey clients to see a one or two point difference from their prior scores, top improvers are those who have seen significant increases in their scores. Scores jumped anywhere from six to ten points at the outpatient clinics of the following medical centers:

• Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California
• Southwestern Vermont Health Center, Bennington, Vermont
• Yale-New Haven Health System, New Haven, Connecticut

Press Ganey interviewed administrators and physicians at these facilities to garner best practices. These clinics found innovative ways to manage staff, address the needs of their patient populations, and create products and governing bodies to push quality improvement. Some of the best practices discussed in this paper are:

• Sensitivity to patient needs
• Patient wait time
• Cheerfulness of medical practice décor
• Cultural sensitivity

While these individual items may not appear on Press Ganey's National Priority Index medical practice administrators from the above facilities say addressing one problem typically leads to the remedy of another. For example, training staff to reduce wait times can lead to better customer service, which is measured in other parts of the survey. Improving conditions may not only increase patient satisfaction scores; happier patients and smoother working conditions can also improve physician satisfaction scores.

The National Priority Index combines information about the performance of medical practices and the relative importance of each item to respondents' overall satisfaction. Higher priority is given to those issues that are relatively important to respondents (high correlation coefficients) and where medical practices scored low nationally (low mean scores) compared with other items on the survey. Items are listed in order of decreasing priority. To compute the Priority Index, questions are rank ordered according to mean score.

Questions with the lowest mean score are given the highest point value. The
questions are then ranked again by correlation to likelihood of recommending and the strongest correlation is given the highest point value. The sum total of the two ranks provides an overall position within the Priority Index. Items with the highest value identify the specific areas where a facility has the most room for improvement and that are likely to have the greatest impact on patients' likelihood of recommending.

Read the full "Medical Practice Top Improvers" article

© March 2007 * pressganey.com * 800.232.8032
Laura Lindberg, Knowledge Manager, Press Ganey Associates, Inc.
Stephanie Holmes, Knowledge Management, Press Ganey Associates, Inc.

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