Measuring Differences Between Patients' and Physicians' Health Perceptions: The Patient–Physician Discordance Scale

摘要

We report on the development and validation of an instrument to assess discordance between physicians and their patients on evaluations of health-related information: the Patient–Physician Discordance Scale (PPDS). The 10-item questionnaire is designed to be employed across chronic diseases and can be used in clinical practice and research. It measures the extent of patient–physician discordance on five aspects of the patient'ls health status and five aspects of the office visit. A prospective study with 200 outpatients with inflammatory bowel disease and their treating physicians revealed that the 10-item discordance scores had good construct validity and satisfactory convergent validity. Overall discordance and the three subscales, discordance on symptoms and treatment, well-being, and communication and satisfaction, identified by factor analysis, had acceptable internal consistency. Patient and physician ratings demonstrated moderate-to-high concurrent validity. Study limitations and directions for future research with PPDS are discussed.