Assessing patient satisfaction with emergency department care delivery using a patient experience framework

Patient satisfaction with their experience during an emergency department (ED) visit is affected both by the quality of the clinical care received and the process of care delivered. This study adapts the generic quality framework developed by Golder, Mitra, and Moorman (2012) (GMM) with a Patient Experience Framework (PEF) tailored to the specific nature of ED care delivery, to systematically review research about ED patient experience. Following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines, this review examines a range of medical publications that reported process interventions to improve patient satisfaction, and retained sixty-five studies. This extant research was then analyzed using the GMM framework as a theoretical lens: while every study considered the emergency care delivery process, only two studies investigated the patient experience process, four studies examined how patients evaluate the care received, and only one study considered all three processes. The review identifies areas for future research on patient satisfaction with their ED experience, which needs to expand its reach beyond processes of care delivery. Quality managers should focus on how patients experience the services performed and how that experience, along with prior expectations, affects a priori expectations and subsequent evaluation of the care received.