Abstract

In the past two decades, there has been a substantial increase in the attention paid to patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in health-care research and clinical practice. Patient satisfaction, in particular, is increasingly the focus of research and evaluation of medical treatments, services, and interventions. A crude PubMed title search for “satisfaction” (over the past 20 years) revealed 6728 articles, almost half of which have been published since 2000. This increase in the number of publications focusing on patient satisfaction (excluding those studies where satisfaction may be one of several end points) parallels the rise of “the patient as an active consumer of health-care services rather than merely as a passive recipient”.