Table 1.

Research Priorities Related to the Integration of Patient‐Report Information with Incentives

The Science of Patients' Narrative Accounts

Establish clear standards for assessing the validity and reliability of narrative accounts

Determine the extent to which different elicitation protocols are more or less effective for different subsets of patients, including those with limited education, lower health literacy, and less personal experience in the health care system

Determine whether the elicitation of narrative accounts is most efficiently integrated into standardized patient experience surveys or collected as part of a free‐standing initiative

Assess ways to most effectively integrate narrative accounts into public reports that include other performance metrics

Determine whether and how complaint elicitation requires a different approach than does the elicitation of patient narratives as part of standardized experience surveys.

Incentives as Inducement to Practice Change

Assess the optimal structure of incentives to make patient experience salient to clinicians: (a) How large a proportion of total incentives (or total clinician compensation)? (b) Should incentives be tied to disaggregated metrics of patient experience or rolled‐up into a single aggregated domain? (c) What proportion of incentives should be targeted to the practice level, what proportion to the compensation of individual clinicians?

Examine how best to structure incentives to encourage a “culture of learning” at the practice/organizational level. Can these be linked to outcomes, or are process measures the only viable metrics for promoting learning? How does practice‐level consultation on patient experience responses translate into improvements in clinical outcome measures?

Cognitive Constraints and Reporting Standardized Metrics of Patient Experience

Examine whether more complex websites with multiple domains can induce or discourage consumer learning in each individual domain

Assess how level of complexity of private reporting relates to clinicians' capacity to identify meaningful opportunities for change, engage with patients, and improve overall quality.