The season of gratitude extends beyond Thanksgiving

According to Webster’s Dictionary, “gratitude” means “the state of being grateful [or] thankfulness.” In light of the Holiday Season and my clients’ experiences with different health systems and hospitals, as both providers and family members of patients, I embarked on a research path to see if there was a correlation between gratitude and both quality of care (perceived or real) and patient satisfaction scores. It turns out that there is a strong connection between gratitude and positive outcomes on reputation and revenues.

According to a 2019 article, What Role Does Patient Gratitude Play in the Relationship Between Relationship Quality and Patient Loyalty?, raises a variety of considerations. Some items to ponder include:

• The health care environment is competitive. If patients (or family members) have an adverse experience, they can choose to go else where and often tell their neighbors about their experience.
• Patient gratitude, patient loyalty, and quality are intertwined.
• There are three relationship quality tactics that those participating in the health care sector should not ignore. For example, “a stronger physician-patient relationship can not only generate a significant impact on the patient’s loyalty to the hospital but it can also make patients more likely to introduce the physician to others.”

The proposed research model was framed with the three quality tactics in mind.

Given the notion of the impact of patient satisfaction scores on reimbursement in some value-based models, gratitude is an item that, if it is genuine, can organically lead to greater reimbursement. Gratitude, like any perceived “currency” also has the place of misuse, as the article Gratitude in Health Care: A Meta-narrative Review suggests.

“Critiquing moral economics, she [Claudia Card] maintains that unpayable debts in this paradigm, where reciprocity is not practical or desirable—as is often the case in health care—make the sense of obligation problematically unresolvable. This position is supported by the research we reviewed that engaged with the meta-narrative of social capital: while economics metaphors are prevalent in the discourse of gratitude, the way it plays out in practice in health care is much more psychologically and philosophically subtle than the metaphor of ‘capital’ suggests.”

Overall, genuine gratitude only has positive benefits – to patients and providers alike. “That gratitude may have a positive impact on quality of life and reduce psychological distress” is something everyone can and should be thankful for.

Rachel V. Rose, JD, MBA, advises clients on compliance, transactions, government administrative actions, and litigation involving healthcare, cybersecurity, corporate and securities law, as well as False Claims Act and Dodd-Frank whistleblower cases. She also teaches bioethics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Rachel can be reached through her website, www.rvrose.com.