Trying to achieve perfect customer satisfaction is not only nearly impossible in most businesses, but is often found to be, including in the case of medical care, completely the wrong approach to improving quality. Quality measurement is more readily applied to easily tracked process measures, like using checklists and giving discharge instructions. But improvements here don’t necessarily lead to improvements in patient outcomes, according to a recent Modern Healthcare article.

Getting medical staff to complete checklists of action items doesn’t focus on the real goals–lower mortality and lower readmission rates–and can lead to unintended consequences like acceding to a patient’s demand for medically unnecessary care.

Someone wrote once that traditional businesses ought to have a dissatisfaction rate of at least ten percent. If not, they were focusing too much on trying to please everyone, rather than doing the best possible job for the greatest number of customers. iSixSigma writes here about the pitfalls of relying too heavily on customer satisfaction surveys.

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” and other such aphorisms may apply just as well for medical care issues as they do for other businesses.