MONDAY, Jan. 23, 2006 (HealthDay News) -- Information collected from only a small number of patients can provide a reliable assessment of the quality of care provided by individual doctors and their office practices, a new study finds.
The study of nearly 13,000 adult patients of 215 doctors at 67 practices found that reports by 45 patients of an individual doctor can provide reliable and highly consistent data.
The finding about the quality of patient reports on their doctors comes at a time of increasing interest in measuring and reported on the quality of health-care providers.
"These findings reveal that among a modest-size sample of a physician's patients, it is possible to obtain a snapshot of what it is like to be a patient of that physician that appears to hold true from patient to patient. The study points to patients' reports as an effective tool that can be used more widely to improve the quality of care," study author Dana Gelb Safran, director of the Health Institute at Tufts-New England Medical Center, said in a prepared statement.
The patients surveyed for this study were asked to rate their doctors on 11 measures reflecting both quality of interactions -- such as how often the doctor explained things in an easy-to-understand way, or treated the patient with respect -- and organizational aspects, such as coordinating care with specialists.
The study appears in the January issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
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