Under the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services patient satisfaction accounts for 30% of the measures of and payments for quality of care. Understanding what drives satisfaction data, how it is obtained, converted into scores, and formulated into rankings, is increasingly critical for imaging departments.

Purpose Assess effects of team training on operational efficiency during outpatient MRI. Materials and Methods In this IRB-approved HIPAA-compliant study, 6 MRI outpatient sites of a Midwestern hospital system were randomized to serve as controls or have their teams trained in advanced communication skills. The 4th quarter fiscal year 2015 (Q4FY15) was the trial baseline. The trial ended Q3FY16. Equipment utilization (completed scans/available slots), hourly scan rates (total orders completed per machine per hour of operation), and no-show rates stratified by time were analyzed using the Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel method, with individual comparisons performed with Bonferroni correction. Results The study encompassed 27,425 MRI examinations. Overall volume peaked at baseline and then declined over the next quarters. Compared to baseline, untrained sites experienced significant drops in equipment utilization (p<0.01 [Q1FY16]; p<0.0001 [Q2 FY16, Q3FY16]), decreasing from 77% to 65% over the study period, corresponding to a decrease from 1.15 to 0.97 in hourly scan rates. For trained sites, these metrics showed no significant change, with maintenance of hourly scan rates of 1.23 and 1.27 and equipment utilization rates of 83% and 85% between baseline and Q3FY16. No-show rates remained stable at trained sites but increased at untrained sites in the last two quarters (p<0.05). Nationally benchmarked patient satisfaction percentile ranking gradually increased at trained sites from 56th at baseline to 70th and successively decreased at untrained sites from 66th to 44th. Conclusion MRI outpatient facilities trained in advanced communication techniques may have more favorable operational efficiency than untrained sites in a saturated market.