Published January 2006

Patient satisfaction up
at The Everett Clinic
Results are part of Premera’s
2005 Quality Score Card

SCBJ Staff

Premera Blue Cross recently released its 2005 Quality Score Card, an annual matrix of health-care practices among participating providers, including The Everett Clinic, whose patient satisfaction scores showed improvements across the board from 2004.

“That’s been a big focus of The Everett Clinic in the past several years now, and our board of directors has been setting goals to consistently improve on that,” said Dr. Al Fisk, medical director of The Everett Clinic.

Through the Premera Outpatient Satisfaction Survey, patients rated how satisfied they were with treatment by office staff, appointment wait times, visit wait times, thoroughness of care and overall quality.

The Everett Clinic patients gave the provider a nearly 100 percent approval rating for its friendly office staff, according to the Quality Score Card. On a satisfaction scale of 1 (poor) and 5 (excellent), The Everett Clinic earned close to a 4 in appointment wait time, nearly 3.5 in visit wait time, nearly 4.5 with thoroughness of treatment and nearly 4.5 with overall quality of care.

Fisk noted that while patient satisfaction is at an all-time high, the health-care provider, which has more than 200 primary- and specialty-care physicians on staff at locations throughout Snohomish County, still needs “to go higher.”

Patient satisfaction was only one of the variables measured as part of Premera’s Quality Score Card, which was developed in collaboration with several Washington state health-care providers and uses a set of quality measures and measurement methods to track health-care practices.

First tested in 2002, the Quality Score Card’s results were initially published by Premera in 2004.

For the 2005 report, medical group participation nearly doubled, according to the Mountlake-Terrace-based insurer. Along with The Everett Clinic, participants included Columbia Medical Associates, Minor and James Medical, MultiCare Health Systems, Pacific Medical Centers, Pediatric Associates, Physicians Clinic of Spokane, The Polyclinic, Puget Sound Family Physicians, Rockwood Clinic, Virginia Mason Medical Center, Swedish Physicians and Wenatchee Valley Medical Center.

Preventive screenings, diabetes monitoring and treatment and use of cost-effective generic drugs were among 19 variables measured, with most participating medical groups posting at least minor improvements on a majority of quality and satisfaction measures last year, according to Premera.

Some of the greatest single-year improvements by individual participating clinics include:

• 34 percent improvement in the recommended rate of well-child visits for infants in the first 15 months of life.
• 33 percent gain in use of appropriate blood pressure medications for diabetes.
• 14 percent improvement in the rate of generic prescribing where a generic is available.
• 12 percent improvement in the recommended rate of cholesterol screenings for people with diabetes.

In most cases, declining performance reflected minor fluctuations in already high-scoring quality areas, Premera said, noting that one exception involved patterns of antibiotic usage, with recommended management of ear infections declining by 9 percent from the previous year, and for acute bronchitis, by 12 percent.

Participating medical groups are using these results to examine why performance has declined and to determine what steps should be taken to address it, Premera said.

New to the 2005 Quality Score Card are three scores that reveal not just how often patients receive evidence-based standards of care, but also the resulting impact on health, according to Premera.

In 2003, a subset of participating medical groups, including The Everett Clinic, began tracking key diabetes health indicators — specifically, control of cholesterol, blood pressure, and ongoing blood sugar — all highly correlated with better long-term health and lower medical costs, Premera said.

The results reveal dramatic improvements for these clinics’ Premera patients from the previous year, including:

• 51.3 percent of diabetic patients had well controlled hemoglobin A1c levels (at or below 7), nearly doubling the previous year’s performance.
• 41.6 percent of diabetic patients had well controlled cholesterol levels (below 100), improving the previous year’s performance by more than half; and
• 38.6 percent of diabetic patients had well-controlled blood pressure (at or below 130), improving the previous year’s performance by nearly half.

“This is an early but exciting indicator,” said Dr. Mark Sollek, Premera’s medical director heading up the Quality Score Card project. “If this improvement can be sustained, it has the potential to reduce heart attacks, hospitalizations, amputations, strokes, blindness, kidney failure and premature deaths — and represent significant savings in health-care costs.”

For more information and complete results of the 2005 Quality Score Card, go online to www.premera.com.

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