When their narrative is beat into your head 24 hours a day, it's hard to get perspective.
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Heaven forbid you call someone overweight and tell them to eat a plant based diet and exercise.
Press Ganey scores are the death of patient treatment.
"An ObamaCare initiative adds extra teeth, to the tune of $850 million, reducing Medicare reimbursement fees for hospitals with less-than-stellar scores.
Accordingly, hospitals kowtow to Press Ganey. In November nearly 2,000 administrators spent $1,100 or more each to attend Press Ganey's glittery client conference--a closed-to-the-public affair in Washington, D.C., with keynotes by Jeb Bush and astronaut Mark Kelly and his wife, former congresswoman Gabby Giffords. Press Ganey is helping hospitals fulfill their mandated obligation. Some have taken an extra step,
tying physicians' compensation to their ratings."
"The short reason: The current system might just kill you. Many doctors, in order to get high ratings (and a higher salary), overprescribe and overtest, just to "satisfy" patients, who probably aren't qualified to judge their care. And there's a financial cost, as flawed survey methods and the decisions they induce, produce billions more in waste. It's a case of good intentions gone badly awry--and it's only getting worse."
"Another emergency room doctor in Columbia, S.C., who requested that we withhold his name, walked us through how this plays out in real life. Between 5% and 7% of his compensation--some $10,000--is dependent on high Press Ganey scores. So when the family of an elderly woman insisted that she be admitted to the hospital after stroke-like symptoms, he agreed to do so, even though her test results were negative and he wanted to send her home. "Her family refused, and they told me so," he recalls. "Do I call security and escort them out? I was more concerned with them giving me a bad patient-satisfaction survey score than her going home and having a stroke," which he considered highly unlikely. In admitting the patient, he exposed her to hospital-borne infections and, worse, a hefty bill for, as he puts it, "us doing nothing since she didn't satisfy the criteria for admission.""
"OVERTREATMENT IS MORE THAN A SILENT KILLER. It's cripplingly expensive. Drill down to almost any procedure that keeps skittish patients happy and the price tag is enormous. Overused prostate cancer screenings? At least $3 billion a year. Unnecessary antibiotics? Another $1 billion annually--with the added harm of creating drug-resistant bacteria. All told, overtreatment accounted for up to $226 billion in 2011, for things like unnecessary procedures and prescriptions that don't help patients. That's according to Donald M. Berwick, the former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which oversees those programs. Another $55 billion a year is directly tied to the abuse of prescribed opiates. Ironic, since government-mandated surveys were supposed to cut medical costs.
Until the government got involved, surveying patients was a sleepy niche business. Then, in 2002, CMS announced a national program to survey patients and require public reporting of the results. "
TL: DR, get rid of Press Ganey and the reimbursement tied to it - and let doctors/providers, be just that.
