A new report from a non-partisan bioethics institute suggests that the patient satisfaction surveys that Medicare uses as part of its value-based purchasing program may not be providing the kind of information on which Medicare payments should be based.
According to the Hastings Center report “Patient-Satisfaction Surveys on a Scale of 0 to 10:  Improving Health Care, or Leading It Astray?” the surveys appear to blend patient satisfaction with their experience while hospitalized with the quality of care they received during that hospitalization and that “Good ratings depend more on manipulable patient perceptions than on good medicine.”
Currently, patient satisfaction is a major component of Medicare’s value-based purchasing program and hospitals can be rewarded or penalized based on their patients’ satisfaction as measured in surveys.  The report notes that “The current institutional focus on patient satisfaction and on surveys designed to assess this could eventually compromise the quality of health care while simultaneously raising its cost.”
Find the complete study here, on the web site of the Hastings Institute.