Quality improvement initiatives are a mainstay for hospital care teams. They can also offer a fresh approach for raising patient satisfaction scores. To achieve maximum effectiveness, however, they require timely patient feedback.

Nowhere is this truer, perhaps, than in the high-volume/short-visit emergency department (ED), where physicians seldom get much insight into how their patients feel about the overall care experience. When physicians do receive patient ratings and comments, that information is often suboptimal:
• Complaint management systems typically report only isolated cases of extreme dissatisfaction.
• Satisfaction surveys such as the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey, provide information from a very small sample, and those data arrive many weeks or even months later—too far removed from the clinical encounter to drive useful change.

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