No abstract

No abstract

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 telephone-only 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.

Recent work involving survey administration among emergency department (ED) patients has demonstrated very low response rates using single-mode (e.g., mail-only or web-only) approaches. In this study, the authors tested several mixed-mode protocols that focus on a push-to-web approach for survey administration in this challenging but important setting. A random sample of 26,991 ED discharged-to-community (DTC) patients discharged in January 2018-March 2018 from 16 hospital-based EDs nationwide were randomized to nine survey arms, eight of which involved a web survey with one or more of the following methods of invitation to the web survey: an emailed link to the web survey, a texted link to the web survey, and/or a mailed paper invitation with information on how to access the web survey. The reference arm was standard mixed mode (mailed survey with telephone follow-up). Invitation(s) to the web survey was followed by (1) a mailed survey, (2) telephone follow-up, or (3) both. The overall response rate across all arms was 18.6% (American Association for Public Opinion Research [AAPOR] RR1). None of the tested web-survey arms had significantly higher response rates than standard mixed mode (25.5%). Protocol comparisons demonstrated that both text outreach and including a telephone mode increased response rates. When examining response by completion mode, the arms involving text invitation had a higher percentage of completed surveys that were completed by web than arms not involving text invitation. Characteristics (e.g., age) of telephone and web respondents were more representative of the sampled population than mail respondents. Older patients and male patients were significantly less likely to be reachable by email or text. These results demonstrate that sequential multi-mode approaches involving web, mail, and telephone with multiple methods of web survey invitation show the greatest promise for obtaining higher response rates and more representative respondents from the ED population.

To ensure fair comparisons across hospices, CAHPS Hospice Survey measure scores should be adjusted for several caregiver and decedent characteristics.