• Gregory M Archual, Ashish R Panchal, Mark G Angelos, and David P Way.
• From the, Department of Emergency Medicine, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, OH.
• Acad Emerg Med. 2020 May 1; 27 (5): 388-393.

ObjectivesEmergency departments (EDs) patient satisfaction metrics are highly valued by hospitals, health systems, and payers, yet these metrics are challenging to analyze and interpret. Accurate interpretation involves selection of the most appropriate peer group for benchmark comparisons. We hypothesized that the selection of different benchmark peer groups would yield different interpretations of Press Ganey (PG) patient satisfaction scores.MethodsEmergency department PG summary ratings of "doctors section" and "likelihood-to-recommend" raw scores and corresponding percentiles were derived for three benchmark peer groups from three academic years (2016, 2017, and 2018). The three benchmarks are: 1) the PG Large database; 2) the PG University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) database; and 3) the Academy of Administrators in Academic Emergency Medicine (AAAEM) database, which is composed only of EDs from academic health centers with emergency medicine residency training programs. Raw scores were converted to percentile ranks for each distribution and then compared using Welch's ANOVA and Games-Howell pairwise comparisons.ResultsFor both patient satisfaction raw scores evaluated, the AAAEM database was noted to have significantly higher percentile ranks when compared to the PG Large and PG UHC databases. These results were consistent for all three time frames assessed.ConclusionsBenchmarking with different peer groups provides different results, with similar patient satisfaction raw scores resulting in higher percentile ranks using the AAAEM database compared to the two PG databases. The AAAEM database should be considered the most appropriate peer group for benchmarking academic EDs.© 2019 by the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine.

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