Clinical Quality and Patient Experience in the Adult Ambulatory Setting

Quality and patient experience are important dimensions of care delivery. The extent to which they are related in the adult outpatient setting is unknown. This brief study utilized data from a large integrated health system over a 1-year period in 2015 and measured the degree of correlation between physicians’ patient experience scores and 8 standardized quality metrics. These quality measures were paired into similar groups to create 4 composite measures: outcome, screening, vaccination, and adherence. Measures of outcome (r = 0.20, P = .06), vaccination (r = 0.12, P = .26), and adherence (r = −0.04, P = .75) were not significantly correlated with patient experience; screening (r = 0.29, P = .006) was minimally correlated with patient experience. Overall, this study found minimal correlation between measures of patient experience and clinical quality in the outpatient setting. Measurement of both of these domains is essential to understanding patterns of care.