Many years ago, I made the mistake of presenting a client’s patient satisfaction scores to them in our annual Management Review meeting without a relevant benchmark. Their results looked something like this:
As the CEO high-fived his leadership team, I weighed my options. I didn’t want to correct him in front of his team, but they needed to know the truth. I interjected gently, “Unfortunately, your center’s patient satisfaction scores are well below average for an adult SUD program”.
To avoid such a problem, this is what I should have shared:
Lesson learned.
Patient satisfaction scores are just one of the metrics that vary tremendously between different types of treatment programs. If the CEO had been running an adult behavioral treatment center, his congratulations would have been appropriate. For whatever reason, patients in primary mental health treatment are a lot less likely to report being very satisfied with the treatment they’re receiving than patients in an addiction treatment center:
And if the CEO was treating adolescents? Their program would have been a superstar!
Improvement in Co-Occurring Disorders
Another type of metric that is important to compare to norms is the improvement in co-occurring disorders between the start of treatment and a patient’s last survey. Every center we’ve ever worked with looks good in the absolute on these measures. Determining whether there is further room for improvement requires you to compare your results to those of similar treatment centers. Once again, fewer patients in addiction treatment programs report still feeling depressed at the end of treatment compared to patients in a general mental health treatment program (many of whom are also battling addiction):
Treatment Completion Variability
A third area where norms are very helpful is with AMA rates. The percentage of patients who successfully complete all recommended treatment or leave against medical advice vary pretty dramatically by patient population:
Compare Your Results to Vista’s Norms
To help you compare your treatment center’s results to those of other similar centers, we regularly publish our norms. You can download Vista’s most recent during-treatment norms by treatment center type here:
- Adult SUD patients
- Adult behavioral patients
- Adolescent SUD patients
- Adolescent behavioral patients
