The Change of Orthopedic Patient Satisfaction Is Associated with the Change of Provider Sex – A Personal Level Data Mining Analysis

In the United States, patient satisfaction is a key indicator of service quality. To improve orthopedic care quality, it is essential to understand factors associated with orthopedic patient satisfaction. The objective of this work was to identify factors related to changes in orthopedic patient satisfaction on a personal level. We retrospectively analyzed an orthopedic outpatient satisfaction survey collected from 10,136 patients after their visits. We identified pairs of orthopedic outpatient visits of the same patients with different satisfaction ratings and created a new data set of differences between these paired visits. Association rule mining was performed on the derived data to analyze associations between changes of patient or provider factors and changes of orthopedic patient satisfaction on a personal level. Accordingly, we identified eight statistically significant and interesting rules. The key finding was that the change of provider sex was associated with the change of satisfaction. Female patients were more satisfied with female orthopedic providers. Switching the provider to different sex was associated with the change of satisfaction in two directions when other factors remained unchanged. Male patients were more satisfied with male providers. Changing a male provider to a female provider was associated with the change from satisfaction to dissatisfaction given other factors were unchanged.