Analytical Insights from Patient Narratives: The Next Step for Better Patient Experience

Taking Patients’ Narratives about Clinicians from Anecdote to Science

“…A growing number of report cards present consumers with standardized metrics of patient experience along with multiple measures of clinical performance and patient safety. 18,20,21 Still other times, consumers select more deliberatively, analytically combining available metrics. 21 Report designers have responded with simplified presentations, 22 but this does not make the actual choice process simple: consumers still must decide how to weigh different aspects of physician performance.…”

“…21 Report designers have responded with simplified presentations, 22 but this does not make the actual choice process simple: consumers still must decide how to weigh different aspects of physician performance. Narratives often richly describe clinicians' bedside manner, caring attitudes, professionalism, and treatment style; all of these elements are essential for assessing the "feel" of these interactions 15,20,24 and their emotional overtones, and yet they are missing from conventional surveys. Often, they prefer learning from the experiences of patients who are most "like them" in expectations, demographics, or health needs.…”

“…10,11 Because most volunteered comments (hereafter "comments") are actually positive, these concerns were largely unfounded. 15,20 We make the case here for this approach by exploring the opportunities and challenges associated with embracing patient narratives and by considering what rigor means when it is applied to qualitative accounts. 13 At the same time, qualitative reports from patients about health care represent an essential missing link both for consumers seeking to understand the experience of other patients and for physicians seeking to learn from patients to improve quality.…”

The SelectMD 2.0 Provider Choice Experiment: Methodological Overview

“…Comments from patients often cover the same experiential domains as CAHPS surveys (such as access to care and information, how well clinicians communicate with patients, and the helpfulness and courtesy of office staff), but in ways that can be easier to understand, more engaging, and also more persuasive to those reading a report than are statistically summarized survey scores (Trigg, 2011;Cognetta-Rieke and Guney, 2014;Detz, Lopez and Sarkar, 2013;Findlay, 2016;Schlesinger et al, 2015). However, the widespread availability of such anecdotal accounts may distract consumers' attention away from sites that offer less engaging but more reliable measures of quality (Kanouse et al, 2016).…”

Breaking Narrative Ground: Innovative Methods for Rigorously Eliciting and Assessing Patient Narratives

“…). It is crucial to proceed with care in generating and presenting narrative data, however, because if available comments fail to convey a full and accurate picture of interactions with clinicians, these potential benefits can be offset by choices that do not align with consumers' own needs and preferences (Trigg ; Cognetta‐Rieke and Guney ; Kanouse et al. ).…”