Date of Award

Summer 8-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Program/Concentration

Health Services Research

Committee Director

Harry Zhang

Committee Member

Denise C. McKinney

Committee Member

Ismail El Moudden

Abstract

Suboptimal patient experience signals a need to improve clinical efficacy, patient safety, and healthcare quality. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified hospital resource and staffing demands, reducing hospitals’ capacity to invest in patient experience improvement. Prior studies remain limited because many lack longitudinal structure and organized theoretical models, making temporal inference difficult and weakening analyses of patient experience disparities. To address these limitations, this dissertation incorporates three studies examining patient experience and pandemic-related effects.

In state-level markets comparable to Virginia, limited research has examined longitudinal patient experience trends across regional hospital systems using HCAHPS scores. The first study uses descriptive trend analysis and multivariable regression to analyze annual HCAHPS scores from 2018 through 2023 across Virginia hospitals, with 2024 unavailable in the analytic dataset. The second study applies multivariable regression to assess COVID-19-related effects by comparing HCAHPS scores across defined time periods. The third study evaluates the extent to which domain-specific HCAHPS scores predict the global patient experience outcome of overall hospital rating.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/k8kc-eh83

ISBN

9798193216698

ORCID

0009-0005-0147-654X

Download

Share

COinS