Patient Satisfaction
Patient satisfaction in these papers mainly refers to the degree to which patients regard a decision-making experience as being useful, effective, and beneficial.
Although patient satisfaction with decision-making is a worthy goal, use of patient satisfaction as a metric of decision quality can be problematic. Such use can be misleading, because patient preference is highly dependent on patient expectations. Patients who enter the decision-making process with low expectations may report high satisfaction scores even if the process was less than ideal. Patient satisfaction is not a reliable metric of quality of the medical experience, decision support, or the decision-making process.
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The Foundation for Informed Medical Decision-making offers these definitions to provide context for the topic areas
and a deeper understanding of the referenced articles within each topic.