Improving Patient Satisfaction with Discharge and Recovery Preparedness

The Outpatient and Ambulatory Surgery Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (OAS-CAHPS) survey is a standardized tool healthcare organizations utilize to measure patient perceptions of care. The survey results are linked to reimbursement by many insurers, making it prudent for health systems to work toward increasing patient satisfaction with their care. This evidence-based practice project followed the Iowa Model of Evidence-Based Practice to implement a quasi-experimental pilot that would determine whether providing written and verbal patient discharge education in both the preoperative phase of care and the postoperative phase of care compared to only the postoperative phase of care would improve patient satisfaction rates related to discharge and recovery preparedness in the outpatient surgery patient population. The increase in both the top-box and percentile ranking scores of the discharge domain questions during the pilot indicates that patient satisfaction was positively impacted using written and verbal discharge education in the preoperative phase of care.