Psychometric properties of the Press Ganey® Outpatient Medical Practice Survey

Background: The Press Ganey® Medical Practice Survey ("Press Ganey® survey") is a patient-reported questionnaire commonly used to measure patient satisfaction with outpatient health care in the United States. Our objective was to evaluate the reliability and validity of the Press Ganey® survey in a single institution setting.

Methods: We analyzed surveys from 34,503 unique respondents seen by 624 providers from 47 specialties and 94 clinics at the University of Utah in 2013. The University of Utah is a health care system that provides primary through tertiary care for over 200 medical specialties. Surveys were administered online. The Press Ganey® survey consisted of 24 items organized into 6 scales: Access (4 items), Moving Through the Visit (2), Nurse Assistant (2), Care Provider (10), Personal Issues (4) and Overall Assessment (2). Missingness, ceiling and floor rates were summarized. Cronbach's alpha was used to evaluate internal consistency reliability. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess convergent and discriminant validities.

Results: Missingness was 0.01% for the total score and ranged from 0.8 to 11.4% across items. The ceiling rate was high at 29.3% for the total score, and ranged from 55.4 to 84.1% across items. Floor rates were 0.01% for the total score, and ranged from 0.1 to 2.1% across items. Internal consistency reliability ranged from 0.79 to 0.96, and item-scale correlations ranged from 0.49 to 0.9. Confirmatory factor analysis supported convergent and discriminant validities.

Conclusion: The Press Ganey® survey demonstrated suitable psychometric properties for most metrics. However, the high ceiling rate can have a notable impact on quarterly percentile scores within our institution. Multi-institutional studies of the Press Ganey® survey are needed to inform administrative decision making and institution reimbursement decisions based on this survey.