Patient experience
Quality Management
Definition. Patient experience is the sum of patients’ interactions with a health system across the continuum of care, including communication, respect, coordination, information and the physical and digital environment.
Explanation
Unlike satisfaction, which is an evaluation, experience asks what actually happened, which makes it more actionable for improvement. Digital services now shape experience too, and design frameworks help build digital patient journeys deliberately (Wang et al., 2024). Large language models can extract unmet needs from patient reviews at scale (Li et al., 2025).
Patient experience is one element of the Triple and Quadruple Aim, alongside population health, cost and staff wellbeing (Arnetz et al., 2020).
Related concepts
Patient satisfaction Patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) Patient journey Patient-centered care Donabedian model
Read on The Health Topics
- Digital Health Design: Framework for Patient Experience
- ChatGPT for Healthcare Needs from Patient Reviews
- EFFECT: Enhancing Healthcare Efficiency for Quadruple Aim and Productivity
References
Arnetz, B. B., Goetz, C. M., Arnetz, J. E., Sudan, S., vanSchagen, J., Piersma, K., & Reyelts, F. (2020). Enhancing healthcare efficiency to achieve the Quadruple Aim: an exploratory study. BMC Research Notes, 13 (1), 362. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-020-05199-8
Li, J., Yang, Y., Chen, R., Zheng, D., Pang, P. C.-I., Lam, C. K., Wong, D., & Wang, Y. (2025). Identifying healthcare needs with patient experience reviews using ChatGPT. PLoS ONE, 20 (3), e0313442. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313442
Wang, T., Zhu, H., Qian, S., Giunti, G., Goossens, R., & Melles, M. (2024). Designing digital patient experiences: The digital health design framework. Applied Ergonomics, 119, 104289. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2024.104289
Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Patient experience. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/patient-experience/