Learning from patients: The impact of using patients' narratives on patient experience scores

Background: Enthusiasm has grown about using patients' narratives-stories about care experiences in patients' own words-to advance organizations' learning about the care that they deliver and how to improve it, but studies confirming association have not been published.

Purpose: We assessed whether primary care clinics that frequently share patients' narratives with their staff have higher patient experience survey scores.

Approach: We conducted a 1-year study of 5,545 adult patients and 276 staff affiliated with nine clinics in one health system. We used multilevel models to analyze survey data from patients about their experiences and from staff about exposure to useful narratives. We examined staff confidence in own knowledge as a moderator because confidence can influence use of new information sources.

Results: Frequency of sharing useful narratives with staff was associated with patient experience scores for all measures, conditional on staff confidence in own knowledge ( p < .01). For operational measures (e.g., care coordination), increased sharing correlated with subsequently higher performance for more confident staff and lower performance or no difference for less confident staff, depending on measure. For relational measures (e.g., patient-provider communication), increased sharing correlated with higher scores for less confident staff and lower scores for more confident staff.

Conclusion: Sharing narratives with staff frequently is associated with better patient experience survey scores, conditional on confidence in knowledge.

Practice implications: Frequently sharing useful patient narratives should be encouraged as an organizational improvement strategy. However, organizations need to address how narrative feedback interacts with their staff's confidence to realize higher experience scores across domains.