Diagnosis and satisfaction scores in emergency department patients who return a mailed survey

Previous studies of patient satisfaction scores (PSS) have been of insufficient size to examine the influence of diagnosis on PSS. Our objective was to utilize a large database to determine if PSS for patients who return a widely used mailed proprietary survey differ with different diagnoses. We retrospectively analyzed a cohort at 11 hospital emergency departments of non-admitted patients who returned a mailed satisfaction survey. We grouped patients according to International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision (ICD9) diagnoses and calculated mean scores for each diagnostic group. We rank-ordered by mean scores all ICD diagnoses having at least 50 survey responses. Scores were compared using analysis of variance. We analyzed 14,098 surveys. Among all diagnoses, 65 had at least 50 responses. The analysis of variance for the scores showed significant differences (p < 0.0001). Scores differ with respect to diagnosis. This could be used to choose interventions to improve scores of patients who return a mailed survey.