Published in:
01-01-2009 | Letter to the Editor
Measuring Primary Care Physician Visit Continuity and Patients’ Experiences of Visit Continuity
Authors:
Hector P. Rodriguez, PhD, MPH, Dana Gelb Safran, ScD
Published in:
Journal of General Internal Medicine
|
Issue 1/2009
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Excerpt
To the Editor:— Dr. Wasson asserts that patient-reported visit continuity measures are valuable because they provide important information about how patients interpret the continuity of care they receive. We agree that patient-reported information is important. And we absolutely did not intend to cause the “elimination of patient reports” as Dr. Wasson says he fears. Patient-reported care experience information is key to a balanced portfolio of quality measures and indispensable to the goal of getting to a patient-centered health care system. However, our analytic findings led us to caution against relying on patient reported continuity of care measures in isolation — given evidence that they capture a combination of information about continuity along with information about other dimensions of the patient’s experience. Administrative continuity measures have proven, in our study and others,
1 to provide a purer, more valid view of that dimension of care. Our results indicate that widely-used patient-reported visit continuity measures do not substitute for administrative data,
2 especially if the goal is to understand how visit continuity with primary care physicians (PCPs) affects quality and outcomes of care. …