Dataset Information

Should measures of patient experience in primary care be adjusted for case mix? Evidence from the English General Practice Patient Survey.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

Uncertainties exist about when and how best to adjust performance measures for case mix. Our aims are to quantify the impact of case-mix adjustment on practice-level scores in a national survey of patient experience, to identify why and when it may be useful to adjust for case mix, and to discuss unresolved policy issues regarding the use of case-mix adjustment in performance measurement in health care.

Design/setting

Secondary analysis of the 2009 English General Practice Patient Survey. Responses from 2 163 456 patients registered with 8267 primary care practices. Linear mixed effects models were used with practice included as a random effect and five case-mix variables (gender, age, race/ethnicity, deprivation, and self-reported health) as fixed effects.

Main outcome measures

Primary outcome was the impact of case-mix adjustment on practice-level means (adjusted minus unadjusted) and changes in practice percentile ranks for questions measuring patient experience in three domains of primary care: access; interpersonal care; anticipatory care planning, and overall satisfaction with primary care services.

Results

Depending on the survey measure selected, case-mix adjustment changed the rank of between 0.4% and 29.8% of practices by more than 10 percentile points. Adjusting for case-mix resulted in large increases in score for a small number of practices and small decreases in score for a larger number of practices. Practices with younger patients, more ethnic minority patients and patients living in more socio-economically deprived areas were more likely to gain from case-mix adjustment. Age and race/ethnicity were the most influential adjustors.

Conclusions

While its effect is modest for most practices, case-mix adjustment corrects significant underestimation of scores for a small proportion of practices serving vulnerable patients and may reduce the risk that providers would 'cream-skim' by not enrolling patients from vulnerable socio-demographic groups.

SUBMITTER: Paddison C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3402750 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Should measures of patient experience in primary care be adjusted for case mix? Evidence from the English General Practice Patient Survey.

Paddison Charlotte C Elliott Marc M Parker Richard R Staetsky Laura L Lyratzopoulos Georgios G Campbell John L JL Roland Martin M

BMJ quality & safety 20120523 8

<h4>Objectives</h4>Uncertainties exist about when and how best to adjust performance measures for case mix. Our aims are to quantify the impact of case-mix adjustment on practice-level scores in a national survey of patient experience, to identify why and when it may be useful to adjust for case mix, and to discuss unresolved policy issues regarding the use of case-mix adjustment in performance measurement in health care.<h4>Design/setting</h4>Secondary analysis of the 2009 English General Pract ...[more]

PMID: 22626735

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Project description:BackgroundPatient experience surveys are important tools for improving the quality of cancer services, but the representativeness of responders is a concern. Increasingly, patient surveys that traditionally used postal questionnaires are incorporating an online response option. However, the characteristics and experience ratings of online responders are poorly understood.ObjectiveWe sought to examine predictors of postal or online response mode, and associations with patient experience in the (English) Cancer Patient Experience Survey.MethodsWe analyzed data from 71,186 patients with cancer recently treated in National Health Service hospitals who responded to the Cancer Patient Experience Survey 2015. Using logistic regression, we explored patient characteristics associated with greater probability of online response and whether, after adjustment for patient characteristics, the online response was associated with a more or less critical evaluation of cancer care compared to the postal response.ResultsOf the 63,134 patients included in the analysis, 4635 (7.34%) responded online. In an adjusted analysis, male (women vs men: odds ratio [OR] 0.50, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.46-0.54), younger (<55 vs 65-74 years: OR 3.49, 95% CI 3.21-3.80), least deprived (most vs least deprived quintile: OR 0.57, 95% CI 0.51-0.64), and nonwhite (nonwhite vs white ethnic group: OR 1.37, 95% CI 1.24-1.51) patients were more likely to respond online. Compared to postal responders, after adjustment for patient characteristics, online responders had a higher likelihood of reporting an overall satisfied experience of care (OR 1.24, 95% CI 1.16-1.32). For 34 of 49 other items, online responders more frequently reported a less than positive experience of care (8 reached statistical significance), and the associations were positive for the remaining 15 of 49 items (2 reached statistical significance).ConclusionsIn the context of a national survey of patients with cancer, online and postal responders tend to differ in their characteristics and rating of satisfaction. Associations between online response and reported experience were generally small and mostly nonsignificant, but with a tendency toward less than positive ratings, although not consistently. Whether the observed associations between response mode and reported experience were causal needs to be examined using experimental survey designs.

Project description:BACKGROUND:Patient experience measures are widely used to compare performance at the individual physician level. OBJECTIVE:To assess the impact of unmeasured patient characteristics on visit-level patient experience measures and the sample sizes required to reliably measure patient experience at the primary care physician (PCP) level. DESIGN:Repeated cross-sectional design. SETTING:Academic family medicine practice in California. PARTICIPANTS:One thousand one hundred forty-one adult patients attending 1319 visits with 56 PCPs (including 45 resident and 11 faculty physicians). MEASUREMENTS:Post-visit patient experience surveys including patient measures used for standard adjustment as recommend by the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Consortium and additional patient characteristics used for expanded adjustment (including attitudes toward healthcare, global life satisfaction, patient personality, current symptom bother, and marital status). RESULTS:The amount of variance in patient experience explained doubled with expanded adjustment for patient characteristics compared with standard adjustment (R2 = 20.0% vs. 9.6%, respectively). With expanded adjustment, the amount of variance attributable to the PCP dropped from 6.1% to 3.4% and the required sample size to achieve a reliability of 0.90 in the physician-level patient experience measure increased from 138 to 255 patients per physician. After ranking of the 56 PCPs by average patient experience, 8 were reclassified into or out of the top or bottom quartiles of average experience with expanded as compared to standard adjustment [14.3% (95% CI: 7.0-25.2%)]. CONCLUSIONS:Widely used methods for measuring PCP-level patient experience may not account sufficiently for influential patient characteristics. If methods were adapted to account for these characteristics, patient sample sizes for reliable between-physician comparisons may be too large for most practices to obtain.

Dataset Information

Should measures of patient experience in primary care be adjusted for case mix? Evidence from the English General Practice Patient Survey.

Objectives

Design/setting

Main outcome measures

Results

Conclusions

Publications

Should measures of patient experience in primary care be adjusted for case mix? Evidence from the English General Practice Patient Survey.

Similar Datasets

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