The Perceived Usefulness of Patient Narrative Feedback in Primary Care Settings

Research suggests that insights from patient narratives – stories about care experiences in patients' own words – contain information that can be used to improve care. However, assessments of narratives reported by clinical personnel have been mixed. This is the first study, to our knowledge, to systematically measure how useful personnel in primary care perceive patient narratives to be. We surveyed 276 clinical and administrative personnel in nine primary care clinics in a large health system in the United States. We found that perceived usefulness of patient narratives is generally high, but varies by individual characteristics such as level of burnout and professional role and with organizational characteristics such as clinic's learning orientation and history of using patient feedback to improve quality. These findings imply that narratives can be useful for improving primary care and that their perceived usefulness is greater when organizational practices facilitate learning from patients' narrative feedback.