Focusing on a patient’s satisfaction can lead to shorter perceived wait times and, yes, high patient satisfaction, according to a study published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

Anna Holbrook, MD, Emory University School of Medicine, and colleagues studied questionnaires completed by 147 MR outpatients who had received care from a radiology department in which “patient experience” was a stated strategic priority. The patients were all asked to do two things: estimate all wait times related to the imaging process and rate their personal satisfaction with the imaging process.

Overall, Holbrook et al. found that the average perceived wait time between patient arrival and examination was 27.8 minutes. The actual average wait time between patient arrival and examination for those patients was 53.4 minutes, a difference of more than 25 minutes.  

In addition, the average perceived examination time was 31.6  minutes, more than 15 minutes shorter than the actual examination time.

As one might expect from patients who think they were at a physician’s office for less time than they were actually there, satisfaction among the group was high. Using a scale of one to five, with five being the highest possible score, 78 percent of patients rated their overall satisfaction as a five. And less than 3 percent of patients rated their satisfaction as a three, two or one.

“For all components of the imaging encounter, shorter wait times, both perceived and actual, were significantly associated with higher encounter satisfaction scores,” the authors wrote.

Holbrook and colleagues explained that, with reimbursements focusing more on value and less on volume, every bit of insight into improving patient satisfaction can play a crucial role to healthcare providers.

“In an era in which patient satisfaction scores are increasingly serving as value-based reimbursement metrics, efforts to improve satisfaction will increasingly affect physician and facility bottom lines,” the authors wrote. “Prior studies have reported associations between shorter perceived and actual wait times and improved satisfaction scores in the emergency department and ophthalmology clinic settings. Our study indicates that these reports can be generalized to the outpatient MRI setting as well. Practices may be able to improve actual wait times only so much, so focusing in parallel on the patient experience—and reducing the perceived lengths of those times, whatever they are—may yield complementary end results.”

On a note more directly related to the usefulness of modern technology, the authors also looked into the impact of providing the patient with an iPad to help pass the time. They found this gesture had no significant effect on patient satisfaction or perceived wait time.

“The reason for this is unclear but could be related to many patients’ already having their own devices (something we had not expected and thus did not ask about),” the authors wrote. “It could also be due in part to the fact that our department had already succeeded, through both staff development and facility design, to make the waiting experience as pleasant as possible.”