Self-Rooming Patients in Health System?

Discussion Tips

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced United States health care systems to fundamentally change care delivery. In this issue of Annals of Family Medicine, the authors of “Primary Care Patients’ and Staff Perceptioins of Self-Rooming as Alternative to Waiting Rooms” describe the results of a survey that examines patient and staff perceptions about one such change, self-rooming. What can this paper teach us about survey studies and changing patient care processes?

Discussion Questions

• What question is asked by this study and why does it matter?

• How strong is the study design for answering the question?

• What was the survey response rate? Why is the response rate considered important in survey research? Did response rate vary by question? What is missing data and why is it an important concept in many types of research?

• Why did the researchers dichotomize the responses to the survey questions that had ordinal responses? What are the downsides of dichotomizing variables?

• What are the main study findings?

• How might the timing of the survey (ie, during the pandemic) have affected survey responses for patients and clinic staff?

• What could explain the difference among the patients, clinical staff, and non-clinical staff groups for the “prefer self-rooming” questions (Tables 2 and 3 of the article)?

• Do you worry about any response biases with patient and/or staff responses? How might further research into this area detect response bias?

• Are there any other data that might influence whether your clinic would implement self-rooming?

• Do you think self-rooming would work in your clinic? If self-rooming was implemented in your clinic, do you think that patients and staff would feel the same way about it as the respondents to this survey did? How might the characteristics of the study authors’ health care system (eg location, size of clinics, patient population) influenced its ability to implement self-rooming?

• What challenges might your clinic have implementing self-rooming?