You. Don’t. Say.
Christmas came early for us skeptics this year. In a landmark study, certainly one of the most interesting and thought-provoking of the year-to-date, researchers from the University of California-Davis found that the more satisfied patients were with their physicians, the higher their hospital admission rates, prescription costs and total costs were. And patients with the highest level of satisfaction with their doctors had higher mortality rates compared to those patients least satisfied with their doctors.
Anecdotally, I think that the push for higher patient satisfaction has led directly to underperforming docs doing things they wouldn’t normally do. This isn’t good medicine, it’s playing a very dangerous game.
