Imaging patients most commonly complain about quality of care, safety and communication

The most common patient complaints related to medical imaging deal with quality of care, patient safety and patient communication, according to a study published in the American Journal of Roentgenology. Most patients were satisfied with how their complaints were resolved.

“In radiology, there is a growing interest in the patient experience of care as part of the triple aim of health care reform, highlighting the need to quantify the patient experience,” wrote Gloria M. Salazar, MD, department of radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and colleagues.

The authors studied patient complaints concerning image-guided interventions from April 1999 to December 2012, classifying them as either single coded or multifactorial. Overall, 146 codes were extracted from 71 patient narratives for an average of more than two codes per complaint.

Seventy percent of patient complaints were multifactorial. More than half of all complaints were clinical, 24 percent involved management and another 24 percent involved relationships. Quality of care, safety and communication breakdown were the most common reasons patients filed complaints.

Salazar et al. found that more than 85 percent of patients were satisfied with how the complaints were resolved. Resolution involved clarification in more than 50 percent of the complaints, apology in more than 30 percent, manager notification in more than 23 percent, financial reimbursement in more than 5 percent and a change in healthcare provider in more than 2 percent.

“Patient satisfaction with complaint resolution was high, emphasizing the need for service recovery and proper response to a grievance,” the authors wrote. “Future studies are still needed to assess how patient-reported data from complaints correlate with patient satisfaction and other aspects of patient-centric care.”