Background/Purpose: Patient satisfaction has been studied as a performance improvement measure in clinical practice among patients with a variety of diseases, but to date there are no validated scales that evaluates it in rheumatic diseases. As part of the Patient Centered Care project in the Rheumatology Division, we developed and piloted a simple questionnaire to study patient satisfaction with the care they receive for their arthritis.

Methods: We developed a 12-item scale, and tested it on 70 patients in the Rheumatology clinic at Stanford University Hospital and Clinics. Based on these responses, we subsequently tested a revised 10-item scale (5 items targeting helpfulness of rheumatology team, and 5 items targeting satisfaction) on a national self-selected sample of 130 arthritis patients. Demographic data were collected including age, gender, race and ethnicity, country of origin, years of education, and perception on rheumatology team members. Following psychometric analysis of this larger sample, we developed a shorter and reliable six-item patient satisfaction scale.

Results:

Our sample (N=130) characteristics included 94% female, 88.4% self-identified as Caucasian, 3.9% Asian, 6.2% Black/African-American and 8.7% Hispanic/Latino ethnicity. Majority of patients (44.6%) were 60-69 years old, and 41.5% had a College degree. 37.7% identified a rheumatologist as part of their rheumatology team, whereas 39.2% mentioned other (e.g. PCP), 13.1% were not sure of the composition of their team, and only 10% mentioned their medical assistant. In addition, 82.9% identified themselves as part of their rheumatology team. 38.5% were seeing a rheumatologist. For the final scale development, we included only items with correlations below 0.9 to reduce redundancy in items. The final scale included 6 items (Table 1). Reliability of the final scale was very high; coefficient Alpha was 0.94 (raw) and 0.95 (standardized). Based on the results of this survey, mean patients satisfaction factor was 6.1± 2.7. Item scale correlations ranged from 0.60 to 0.87. The only demographic variable found to be correlated with satisfaction was identifying a rheumatologist as part of the rheumatology team (correlation 0.37 ± 0.5, p-value <.0001).

Conclusion: A simple and practical questionnaire to measure patient satisfaction with their rheumatology care was developed and piloted on 130 patients. This is a condition-specific scale, which may be useful in determining satisfaction with specific practices and possibly physicians.

Table 1. Items included in final rheumatology patient satisfaction scale

On a scale from 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with how your arthritis team works with you to:

1. Know more about your arthritis
2. Get to see your team when you feel you need to see them
3. Solve problems related to my arthritis
4. Set goals for the treatment of my arthritis
5. Manage your emotions related to arthritis
6. Decide when I need to make an office visit for my arthritis

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ACR Meeting Abstracts - https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/development-and-pilot-of-a-patient-satisfaction-scale-in-rheumatology/