Patient feedback: A quality improvement study in outpatient settings.

Patient Feedback (PF) is a web-based quality improvement (QI) system designed to monitor patient ratings of therapeutic alliance and other quality indicators in order to empower clinical staff. Improvement in therapeutic alliance has been shown to be associated with improvement in a variety of clinically important outcomes including attendance, retention, and abstinence. This poster reports on a feasibility study that was designed and implemented at six CTN clinics beginning in April 2004. It involved the administration of a 12-item confidential Patient Feedback Survey completed by clients at the close of group every other week for three months. The survey asked clients to rate their satisfaction with sessions, including whether or not they felt respected by their clinicians and whether they felt the sessions were helpful. The surveys were then converted into feedback reports, which each clinician and clinic could access securely on the Patient Feedback web site.

Overall, patients reported clinicians were performing very well, with relatively low average levels of patient drug and alcohol use. Similarly, alliance and treatment satisfaction ratings were high across all assessments. There was also evidence of improvements in average patient therapeutic alliance scores over time during the intervention phase for those clinicians who had initially poor treatment satisfaction ratings. This study demonstrated that the implementation of a semi-automatic quality improvement system for clinicians in addiction treatment facilities is feasible from both a research and clinical perspective and can be a low-cost, high impact way of conducting performance improvement studies.

Related protocols: CTN-0016