Online patient experience surveys show that patients are satisfied with radiologist performance when it comes to time spent in consultation and friendliness, according to a study published February 24 in the American Journal of Roentgenology.
The findings underscore the benefits of online surveys for generating useful feedback for radiologist performance and demonstrate that radiologists are keeping pace with their physician peers.
"Radiologists scored highly on patient experience surveys when evaluated on encounters involving invasive procedures, achieving scores similar to those for other physicians," wrote a team led by Dr. Neena Kapoor of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
Kapoor and colleagues collected patient experience feedback from outpatient visits that occurred between May 2017 to November 2018. Patients received an emailed 10-question survey about their encounter with a specific provider; questions addressed issues such as time spent with the patient and the friendliness/courtesy of the physician. The survey was based on a five-point Likert scale that was converted to a 100-point framework, and results were posted on publicly available physician profiles. A total of 71,885 surveys were included in the study. Of these, 2,703 were for 65 radiologists, 49,403 for 916 physicians in 17 nonsurgical specialties, and 19,779 for 262 physicians in 13 surgical specialties.
The team found that radiologists had similar overall performance scores compared to their nonradiologist peers, at 95.6 versus 95.9 out of 100. As well, scores improved over the study period for radiologists, from 94.2 to 97.1.
"[Our] findings support the utility of implementing patient experience surveys in radiology," Kapoor's group concluded.
