Measuring Patient Experiences of Integration in Health Care Delivery: Psychometric Validation of IntegRATE Under Controlled Conditions

The objective of this study was to assess the psychometric properties of IntegRATE—a 4-item patient-reported measure of integration in health care delivery—under controlled conditions. Adults who reported having received health care in the previous year were exposed to a fictional health care scenario featuring good, mixed, or poor integration on 1 or 2 occasions. They were then asked to imagine themselves as a patient in the scenario and complete IntegRATE and other measures. The data collected were analyzed to assess the discriminative, concurrent, and divergent validity of IntegRATE and its test–retest reliability and responsiveness using both “sum score” and “top score” scoring approaches. Six-hundred people participated in the study with 190 taking part on 2 occasions. The IntegRATE sum score demonstrated discriminative validity, concurrent validity, divergent validity, and responsiveness and partially demonstrated test–retest reliability. The IntegRATE top score demonstrated concurrent validity, divergent validity, and responsiveness and partially demonstrated discriminative validity and test–retest reliability. We conclude that the IntegRATE sum score exhibits encouraging psychometric properties and performs more optimally than the IntegRATE top score.