Patient satisfaction surveys are worthless. Here's why.

--------------------------------------------------------------- Here are the stories you missed on KevinMD. Thank you for your continuing readership. --------------------------------------------------------------- Sponsors [6 strategic advantages of hospital contact center consolidation](. Find out why unifying your infrastructure can streamline processes and deliver better customer service. [Read the eBrief now](. Health care delivery continues to undergo unprecedented change -- how are you affected by burnout, EHR issues, and the changing practice models? Share your thoughts in [the new Future of Healthcare Survey](. For every 100 appointments, [seven won’t show](. With a $20 co-pay and average reimbursement of $90, your practice is losing as much as $41,000/year. Tired of calling patients to remind them about appointments? [Get that time and money back now](. What hospital CIOs are prioritizing for 2018: [View infographic](. [Patient misidentification can lead to medical errors, patient harm, and costly inefficiencies]( for providers. Get the facts on patient misidentification, and [learn how to avoid it]( from organizations that use biometrics to do so. --------------------------------------------------------------- KevinMD Plus: Jan. 22, 2018 [Patient satisfaction surveys are worthless. Here’s why.]( For several years, Medicare has tied hospital reimbursement to its definition of quality of care. Poorly performing hospitals can be penalized as much as 2% of their Medicare payments. As part of Medicare’s assessment of quality, surveys are used to measure patient experience and satisfaction. One of the components of the Medicare survey is pain management, […] [The practice of emergency medicine is a team sport]( “Same team!” bellowed all the frustrated parents from the sideline of a lacrosse game as we watched two teammates clash sticks while fighting to catch the same pass. Both players missed the ball, and the other team scooped it up and scored, perfectly illustrating to our kids what happens when they battle among themselves. It’s […] [How Havard changed my health care leadership career]( As a senior health care executive, I plan continuing education carefully each year to ensure I am maintaining competence and pursuing excellence in leadership development. Unsettled by barriers perceived for women in leadership locally and nationally, I did not expect the career development programs offered through my agency would meet my needs. My search led […] [The patient is your only focus]( It was another weekend of training in Hakomi. We were working on figuring out our resources (those things in our lives that help us get through tough times). It was the second day of training for this block, and my student therapist asked how things were going “day by day, usual days, the usual stuff.” […] [Bad things happen to every doctor]( The fact that unexpected outcomes and rare events occur is one of the realities of medicine that is difficult to comprehend until you have personally experienced it. There are over 130 million emergency department visits annually, over 16 million of which require admission to a hospital. With that many encounters, even the rarest of events […] --------------------------------------------------------------- [An inspiring KevinMD keynote]( will make your event memorable. "Kevin's keynote presentation was perfect. Extremely rich in content, and a delivery that is world class." [Visit Kevin's speaking page]( to find out more. --------------------------------------------------------------- [A physician cancels his life insurance policy. Here’s why.]( My blog is called “DiverseFi” because my path to financial independence was not the typical one. Although I’ll talk more about this in another post, my journey neither started from humble beginnings nor was frugality my guiding principle. In fact, it was only after discovering the FIRE community, did I realize that I was indeed […] [A patient accused this doctor of sexual harassment]( It was a typical weekend on call. The usual number of surgeries, ER calls and consults. I was called to consult on 47-year-old female who had been admitted with four days of left shoulder pain. She had gone through a cardiac workup and was cleared by her internist. So now, a consult was called to […] [What’s the point of a perfect patient chart?]( Last week I made a patient’s chart perfect. Not bragging, but ultimately it ended up being pretty easy, and I’ll explain how and why in a little bit. This was a patient I had not seen in several years, with a number of chronic medical problems, for which he had been taking less than optimal […] [How gauze and tape healed a relationship]( “You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.” – Annie Dillard Months ago, when my patient and his wife were in my office for the very first time, I could already tell that he would resist any display of sympathy from her and she would clearly […] [Physician burnout is caused by systems problems. Here’s how to fix that.]( I am very resistant to burnout solutions that focus solely on the individual, as these seem to imply that the problem originates in the affected person. This approach pokes at a sore spot, because of the years I spent secretly worried that the reason I left practice was personal weakness or inadequacy, something I lacked […] [Solving major problems in medicine through innovation]( Solving major problems in medicine through innovation can be boiled down to a process that teaches doctors how to be inventors. It’s called biodesign. In this episode, surgeon David Hindin traveled to Silicon Valley to visit Stanford University and learn more about their biodesign program. Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage […] [The story of how this physician got into debt]( When I was a young lad, just heading off to college, I had no debt. I had no credit cards. My family didn’t use debt for purchases other than buying our house. I really didn’t have any knowledge about how to best use debt. My student loan package included a scholarship, a work-study program and […] [Please show more interest in your health than my looks]( In 2017, more women than men were accepted into medical school for the first time. 2017 also brought attention to the sexual harassment many women face that often goes ignored. Medicine is not immune to behavior that objectifies women and ignores their complaints. My experiences are mild in comparison to many of my peers, but […] [Women in medicine: Getting to this point came at a cost]( Sometimes life just walks right up and slaps you in the face. It happened to me while attending the dynamic FIX17 conference in NYC, and it led to an epiphany: At the ripe old age of 59, I am officially a dinosaur. I was giving a talk on the history of women in medicine. Passionate about the […] [A 16-page note with little information to help physicians]( My pediatric practice is one which harkens back to days long ago when physicians knew their patients and pertinent medical histories by heart. My 81-year-old father and I were in practice together for the past 16 years; he still used the very sophisticated “hunt and peck” to compose emails. The task of transitioning to an […] [5 ways poorly thought out health IT can worsen patient safety]( The frontlines of health care have been transformed over the last decade as electronic medical records have been rolled out across America. Unfortunately, information technology has yet to live up to its immense promise in health care­ — a topic that I frequently write about. As somebody who has worked with every single major EHR […] [Young surgeons are learning robotic surgery in the shadows]( Artificial intelligence and robotics spell massive changes to the world of work. These technologies can automate new tasks, and we are making more of them, faster, better and cheaper than ever before. Surgery was early to the robotics party: Over a third of U.S. hospitals have at least one surgical robot. Such robots have been in […] [MKSAP: 55-year-old woman after bariatric surgery]( Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 55-year-old woman is evaluated during a routine examination. She underwent biliopancreatic diversion with duodenal switch 8 years ago for treatment of obesity-related complications and lost 68.0 kg (150.0 lb) in the first year following surgery. Her weight has been relatively […] [If politicians really want to address the problems in health care, this is what they should do]( Americans witnessed the many failed attempts of our elected officials to reform our broken health care system over the past year. Some call for repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) while others think it is the cure-all for what ails our system. The simple fact that politicians fail to consider is the fact […] [What a toddler can teach physicians about the stock market]( We are now almost 2 1/2 years into this parenting thing. It is a pretty amazing thing, raising a toddler. There are a lot of awesome days, watching him learn and explore his surroundings. The sentences that are coming out of his mouth now are pretty wild. He is funny, has a good amount of […] [10 ways this primary care physician will work smarter in 2018]( I don’t regularly make any New Year’s resolutions, but this year I am tossing around a couple of ideas. One reason is that I have so many things going on that I need to be clever about how I use my time. I work four days a week at my regular clinic, and I also […] --------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this email because you subscribed to the KevinMD e-newsletter. If a friend sent you this email and you want to subscribe, go to [KevinMD](. --------------------------------------------------------------- 173 Daniel Webster Highway Nashua, New Hampshire 03062 [Unsubscribe]( | [Change Subscriber Options](