Patient satisfaction: the new area of focus for the physician's office.

Using an importance-performance approach, current and ex-patients of a physician were contrasted in terms of their assessments of their expectations and perceptions toward various medical practice attributes or characteristics. Results suggest that differences across attributes exist, expectations and perceptions of most of the key dimensions are distinguishing characteristics between the two patient groups. The variations are with the performance of the physician and his staff and not with the importance of the attributes or characteristics. These results provide some insights and interesting debate concerning the potentially changing nature of the private practice physician.