Understanding and Using Patient Experience Feedback to Improve Health Care Quality: Systematic Review and Framework Development

Abstract

Patient experience data is increasingly collected worldwide; however, questions persist regarding how it is used to improve health care quality. Synthesizing information from the existing literature, we have developed an empirically based framework to help organizations and managers understand what to do with patient experience feedback to improve health care quality at the organizational level. We identified six post-data collection/analysis activities, which were categorized into three main themes: 1) make sense of the data, 2) communicate and explain the data, and 3) plan for improvement. Our framework suggests that simply executing a survey will not improve performance. It is necessary that leaders understand the data, disseminate findings to all stakeholders, help staff understand the data, and then create a platform where all key stakeholders can be involved in discussing the results to generate improvement plans.