Proposed Patient-Inclusive Methodology for Developing and Validating Patient Experience Surveys.

Patient experience while using telehealth services impacts patient care, and health system incentives and reimbursement. Therefore, the patient experience should be continuously improved, which requires evaluation. Surveying patients is integral to this process. Ideally, patient experience surveys used to evaluate telehealth services should cover patient experience sub-themes, be validated, and minimize bias. This paper evaluates how current validated patient experience surveys cover patient experience sub-themes, and how many are telehealth-specific. We collected 11 validated patient experience surveys. We then extracted five themes and 114 sub-themes of the patient experience. We evaluated survey questions against patient experience sub-themes. We found that current validated patient experience surveys cover, at most, 20.2% of patient experience sub-themes, with the most common sub-themes being "Psychosocial Needs" (81.8%) and "Information: Treatment" (72.7%). We cross-referenced validated patient experience surveys against validated telehealth-specific surveys. Only one validated patient experience survey (PEQ) was also telehealth-specific.