In an initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, RIWI worked with researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics at Northwestern University, the Feinberg School of Medicine, and Harvard’s Center for Primary Care in order to collect a sample of random Internet users across India, Kenya, Mexico, and Nigeria in November 2016. The survey was administered via RIWI’s Random Domain Intercept Technology (RDIT), a technology platform developed by RIWI to deliver opt-in surveys to large representative random samples of anonymous Internet users.
This permitted research into the prevalence of patient-reported excellence of healthcare in the countries surveyed. Of 14,008 respondents, only 21.8% rated their care as excellent. In general, wait time was most often rated excellent while cleanliness was the quality least often rated excellent. The urban population was much more likely than the rural population to rate care as excellent. Notably, perceived respect from providers was associated with excellence ratings. On the whole, however, patient-reported quality of care was perceived as low in these four low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), despite the fact that respondents were mainly young, well-educated Internet users.
The authors of the publication (Kim JH et al. Predictors of Patient-Reported Quality of Care in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Four-Country Survey of Person-Centered Care. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, https://doi.org/10.1093/intqhc/mzab110) deemed this work important because of the insight they gained about what constitutes quality care in the minds of patients. At its core, the essential factor was the responsiveness of the health system to patients’ individual needs. The authors concluded that improving person-centered care will be an important component of building high-quality health systems in LMICs.
For access to the abstract in The International Journal for Quality in Health Care (IJQHC), please visit:
https://academic.oup.com/intqhc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/intqhc/mzab110/6329399
Image Credit: Enric Moreu licensed under Unsplash