National Testing of the Emergency Department Patient Experience of Care Discharged to Community Survey and Implications for Adjustment in Scoring

Background: The emergency department (ED) setting is unique and measuring quality of care in the ED requires the development of ED-specific tools. The Emergency Department Patient Experience of Care Discharged to Community Survey was designed to measure patient experience in the ED setting. Objectives: Describe results from the Emergency Department Patient Experience of Care Discharged to Community Survey including respondent characteristics and reported patient experience, and examine factors, including mode of survey administration, associated with response propensity and response patterns. Research Design: In total, 16,006 discharges were sampled from 50 hospitals nationwide to receive the survey using a mode experiment design. Logistic regression modeled response propensity; linear regression examined associations between response patterns and patient characteristics and mode. Subjects: In total, 3122 survey respondents. Measures: Measures of patient experience. Results: Patients reported that hospitals consistently informed them of the purpose of any new medications (84% yes, definitely), but did not consistently explain their possible side effects (53%). Age, education, health, and arrival by ambulance were significantly associated with response patterns. There were significant differences in response rate by mode: 29% mixed mode, 22% telephone only and 14% mail only. Mode of administration was significantly associated with response patterns whereby patients surveyed using telephoneonly or mixed mode tended to respond more positively than those surveyed using mail only. Conclusions: There is room for improvement in terms of patient experience in the ED setting. Effects of patient characteristics and survey mode on responses were large enough to necessitate appropriate adjustments if hospitals are to be compared in the future.