Improving the healthcare user experience: an optimization model grounded in patient-centredness

Background: Patient satisfaction and experience are key outcomes of healthcare and can be computed as powerful measures of service quality. Understand what affects them is essential for service quality improvement. Investigating whether the care setting (i.e., medical or surgical) can impact the patients’ perception of the quality can be also important for the actionability of this data. The aim is to explore which experiential factors should be prioritized to improve patient satisfaction with hospitalization service, using experience items as intermediate results and considering different settings. Methods: Patient-reported experience measures are used in an Italian region. This study uses the optimization approach to identify factors of healthcare user experience affecting and enhancing satisfaction. Results: The results confirm that, among the significant determinants of satisfaction, some specific experiential aspects emerged as the potential primary focus to be prioritized in improvement actions. These aspects vary according to the specific departmental area. Conclusions: The study presents an optimization model directly informed by healthcare service users, utilizing their insights to drive healthcare delivery improvements. It emphasizes the necessity of not only collect patient perspectives but also applying different methodologies to understand what matters to patients and what interventions could be prioritized, and to strategically use diverse insights to enhance the delivery of healthcare services and patient experience and satisfaction.