Proportional Distribution of Patient Satisfaction Scores by Clinical Service: The PRIME Model

The Proportional Responsibility for Integrated Metrics by Encounter (PRIME) model is a novel means of allocating patient experience scores based on the proportion of each physician's involvement in care. Secondary analysis was performed on Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems surveys from a tertiary care academic institution. The PRIME model was used to calculate specialty-level scores based on encounters during a hospitalization. Standard and PRIME scores for services with the most inpatient encounters were calculated. Hospital medicine had the most discharges and encounters. The standard model generated a score of 74.6, while the PRIME model yielded a score of 74.9. The standard model could not generate a score for anesthesiology due to the lack of returned surveys, but the PRIME model yielded a score of 84.2. The PRIME model provides a more equitable method for distributing satisfaction scores and can generate scores for specialties that the standard model cannot.