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The Association Between Patient Satisfaction and Waiting Time

Keywords: Top-box satisfaction, waiting time, patient-physician interaction, HLM

Patient satisfaction has become one of the most important outcome measures in health care services. Finding significant factors or confounders that affect satisfaction is of special interest for health care quality improvement.

In this poster, we aim to examine the association between patient satisfaction and waiting time, an important factor of interest for health care service management. Data to be analyzed were collected through a patient satisfaction survey at Nemours, one of the leading pediatric health care systems in US. Since the outcomes clearly have a multilevel structure (patients at level 1 and physicians at level 2), the hierarchical linear model (HLM) was used to account for within-cluster correlation. Adjusted by patient characteristics, the cluster-specific satisfaction scores such as specialty, hospital, and geographic region scores are estimated. Another goal of the analysis is to assess covariate effects such race and ethnicity on perceived satisfaction.

Our main results show that waiting time, including patient perceived waiting and actual waiting, has a negative correlation with satisfaction. We found that the correlation is not linear.