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Using Standardized Patients to Assess Hospitalist Communication Skills.
J Hosp Med. 2017 Jul;12(7):562-566
Authors: Chang D, Mann M, Sommer T, Fallar R, Weinberg A, Friedman E
Abstract
Standardized patients (SPs) have been used to assess communication skills in undergraduate medical education, but no published studies describe the use of SPs in assessing practicing physicians on their communication skills. In this study, done with 23 hospitalists at a large urban academic hospital, 3 SP scenarios, daily rounding, discharge, and interacting with a difficult patient, were created. After each encounter, each hospitalist reviewed their videotape and received feedback from their SP based on a checklist that had 3 core domains: Listen, Courtesy and Respect, and Explain. These domains correlated with the 3 questions in the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey that relate to doctors. Hospitalists performed significantly better in the Listen domain, with a mean percent adequate score of 90.2% (95% confidence interval [CI], 72.2%-100%;