People are more likely to recommend a hospital based on the comfort they felt when hospitalized rather than the quality of the care they received, a new study has found.

Good food, rooms with a view, friendly nurses, peace and quiet, more television channels, and other amenities impress patients more than higher survival rates and lower hospital-acquired conditions rates.

These are among the findings from an analysis of patient satisfaction data from 3000 hospitals between 2007 and 2010.

This has long been a concern of NASH, and in the past, NASH wrote to federal regulators in response to proposals to use patient survey results in Medicare quality purchasing programs, explaining that

… we believe some of the [federal government’s] survey’s questions are biased against large urban hospitals.  We think it is inappropriate, for example, to compare the degree of quietness of a seventy-five-year-old hospital with semi-private rooms located in a congested urban area with that of a new facility with private rooms located on a sylvan, multi-acre campus set well off any major thoroughfares. 

Learn more about how inpatients view their hospital experiences and how those experiences shape how they rate hospitals in Oxford Academic’s Social Forces article “Patients as Consumers in the Market for Medicine: The Halo Effect of Hospitality” and find a summary of that analysis in the HealthLeaders Media article “Hospitality Trumps Clinical Outcomes When It Comes To Patient Satisfaction.”