Editor’s Capsule Summary
What is already known on this topic
Patient satisfaction surveys are increasingly used to compare provider performance and often linked to reimbursement.
What questions this study addressed
This study compared Press Ganey survey responses for the same physician in 2 locations, an urban tertiary care emergency department and 2 suburban urgent care centers in the same care delivery organization.
What this study adds to our knowledge
Physician scores were systematically higher in the urgent care centers. The effect of differences in insurance status and waiting time between the locations and other variables, including changes in physician behavior by location, could not be assessed in this small sample.
How this is relevant to clinical practice
Physician ratings are not simply stable properties of individual physicians but are systematically affected by other unknown factors, challenging their validity for interphysician comparisons.