Unveiling Disparities in Patient Rights Awareness and Practice: Insights From Artificial Neural Networks.

BACKGROUND

High-quality universal health care coverage for all patients is the common theme in patient rights. However, pertinent investigations on this topic within the context of Jordanian health care are absent. This systematic review, coupled with a pooled artificial intelligence analysis of the data in retrieved studies, paves the way for such research by pooling data sets sourced from across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

METHODS

National Library of Medicine (NLM), through its secondary database of primary literature (PubMed), was queried with the terms "Patient" and "Rights" in April 2024. Quantitative surveys from MENA containing individual item assessments mapped to 1 of the 7 domains of Jordan National Patient Rights Charter were pooled. Finally, factors extracted for all studies were then used to build an artificial neural network (ANN) to test the hypothesis that information asymmetry in both awareness and practice of patient rights exist even among health care providers.

RESULTS

A total of 8 studies with 131 survey items were identified in the MENA region. All items tested either knowledge (awareness) or practice (implementation) of respondents regards patient rights except for 25 items in one study which measured both. ANN converged to a best net of multilayer feedforward with 3 hidden nodes. Patient right domain, from Jordanian Patient Rights Charter, ranked first and respondent type second as most important among the variables. However, there was huge and statistically significant asymmetry between students 0.602 (0.499 to 0.853), patients 0.627 (0.518 to 0.636), and nurses 0.492 (0.340 to 0.786) on one side and clinicians 1.166 (1.025 to 1.258) on the other side in the ANN model (both paired t test and Wilcoxon signed rank test P <0.0001) for any pairwise comparisons.

CONCLUSIONS

Jordan National Patient Charter can fit any patient right item one could think of in the infinite space of patient rights. Huge information asymmetry exists in both awareness and implementation between practicing professionals and society but also among the different health professions.