A questionnaire identifying four key components of patient satisfaction with physician communication

Objective: To improve efficiency and retain the 4 factors of a reliable, valid interview satisfaction questionnaire (ISQ).

Method: 105 residents conducted 301 patient-centered interviews with 10 simulated patients (SP). SPs portrayed three scenarios for each resident and completed the ISQ and the Communication Assessment Tool (CAT) after each. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of the ISQ and CAT determined which items had >0.5 factor loadings and <0.1 error, criteria for retaining items in a shortened scale.

Results: After the CFA, 13 items were deleted resulting in a 12-item scale (RMSE=0.06) that confirmed the initial 4 factor structure of satisfaction with: open-endedness, empathy, confidence in the resident, and general. Scale reliability of each factor was high (Cronbach's alpha ranged from .74 to .93). Demonstrating concurrent validity, all four factors of the ISQ correlated highly with the one-factor CAT (r>.7, p<.001), and the second order unidimensional ISQ scale also correlated highly with the CAT (r=.83, p<.001).

Conclusions: The ISQ is an efficient, reliable, and valid instrument that uniquely deconstructs satisfaction with the patient-physician interaction into 4 key components.

Practice implications: The 4 components provide a means for better understanding poor satisfaction results.