In medicine, we have always been good at measuring what we can count: mortality rates, complication rates, readmissions. For much of the 20th century, that was enough. The modern challenge — and the modern opportunity — is measuring something harder to quantify but no less consequential: whether the patient felt cared for, informed and respected. That dimension of healthcare is what we call patient experience, and it is fast becoming one of the most important frontiers in clinical quality. This week, the healthcare industry marks Patient Experience Week to focus the spotlight on this important concept.
Patient experience is not the same as patient satisfaction, though the two are related. It encompasses every interaction a patient has with the healthcare system: how clearly clinicians communicate, how well pain and anxiety are managed, whether patients feel treated with dignity, and whether they leave an encounter understanding what happened to them and what comes next. Research consistently shows that strong patient experience correlates with better clinical outcomes, higher rates of treatment adherence, fewer malpractice claims, and lower rates of preventable readmission. For healthcare providers, improving patient experience is not a soft goal — it is a clinical and operational imperative.
Anesthesiology has historically been one of the hardest specialties to assess through the patient’s eyes. For decades, this made it easy to overlook the patient’s experience of anesthesia altogether. At U.S. Anesthesia Partners, Inc. (USAP) we decided that was no longer acceptable.
USAP is the only national anesthesia provider to routinely measure patient satisfaction. Of the roughly 2 million cases our more than 4,500 clinicians handle each year across more than 700 facilities in 13 states, each patient receives a validated post-anesthesia survey by text or email within days of their procedure. About a quarter respond, generating a dataset that now ranks among the largest continuous records of patient-reported anesthesia experience in the country. The data drives change.
The results from the first quarter of 2026 illustrate what sustained measurement can produce. Across USAP, 96.6 percent of patients rated their anesthesia experience positively — nearly 2 full percentage points above the national benchmark of 94.7 percent. All 12 of our regional platforms exceeded that benchmark. North Texas led at 96.9 percent, followed by Tennessee and Central Texas, each at 96.8 percent. This marks the second consecutive year USAP has outperformed the national standard by nearly 3 percentage points. These are results we worked to achieve, through deliberate measurement and deliberate improvement.
The quantitative data tells part of the story. The patient comments tell the rest. After a recent procedure in San Antonio, a patient — herself a healthcare professional — wrote about her anesthesiologist: “I did not expect such patience and compassion from an anesthesia team.” That comment will never appear in a statistic. But it describes exactly the kind of care every healthcare clinician should aspire to provide, and it is the kind of feedback that helps doctors and other providers understand the human impact of their work.
Our operating principle at USAP is that problems are universal, but solutions are local. The aggregate survey data tells us where to look; the improvements happen in individual hospitals and clinics. Acting on patient feedback, we have worked with facilities to improve parking access for ambulatory surgery patients, retrained clinicians on how to communicate with anxious patients and their families, built preoperative education tools, and revised post-surgical pain-management protocols. We have also published peer-reviewed research on the factors that most influence patient satisfaction in anesthesia — contributing to a knowledge base that extends well beyond our own practice.
What USAP is doing in anesthesia reflects a broader transformation underway across medicine. The healthcare industry is learning, sometimes slowly and sometimes with urgency, that data about the patient’s subjective experience can be as clinically meaningful as data about their physiology. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has embedded patient-experience measures into hospital reimbursement through the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey. Health systems nationwide are deploying real-time feedback tools, AI-assisted sentiment analysis of patient comments, and predictive models that identify patients at risk of a poor experience before they are even discharged.
Anesthesia’s own history offers an instructive precedent. In the 1940s, the anesthesia-related mortality rate was roughly one death per 1,000 procedures. Today, for healthy patients undergoing routine surgery, the risk is fewer than one in 200,000 — an objective the Institute of Medicine’s landmark 1999 report singled out as a model for all of medicine. Those gains were the product of a specialty that decided to take its own data seriously.
Patient Experience Week is an opportunity for the healthcare industry to reflect on how far we have come and how far we still have to go. At USAP, we believe that listening to patients systematically, acting on what they tell us, and holding ourselves accountable to what the data reveals is not a supplement to clinical excellence. Making the anesthesia encounter visible, measurable and accountable is vital to quality patient care.
Dr. Richard P. Dutton, MD, MBA, is Chief Quality Officer of U.S. Anesthesia Partners and founding Executive Director of the Anesthesia Quality Institute.
