Could you please help us explain our percentile rankings
to our employees?  Some are having a hard time understanding
how a 4.21 for pain management in our Maternity Unit put us in a relatively
low percentile, but in Orthopedics a 4.21 put us in a high percentile.

Response:

An attribute's national database average differs by the unit surveyed. In other words, patients across America receiving service in a maternity unit have rated pain management differently than patients receiving service in an orthopedics unit.  Why?  That's a very complex question, but it has a lot to do with the type of procedure, expectations going in, and how relevant that particular attribute is with respect to the service received.

HealthStream Research compares your results to our robust national databases for each patient-experience variable.  HealthStream Research’s databases allow you to drill down to highly specific areas within your organization.  For example, your Orthopedics units are compared to the scores of all Orthopedics units in our database, rather than to all Inpatients.  This allows for much more meaningful comparisons and effective goal-setting.

Due to the fact that the National Average for pain management among patients having visited a maternity unit is 4.21, and that among patients having visited an orthopedics unit it is 3.95, a rating of 4.21 received by a particular hospital's maternity and orthopedics units would produce very different percentile rankings.

This situation is seen in many areas of life—for example, a first grader reading at the same level as a fifth grader would be quite high on the charts.   However, a fifth grader reading at a fifth grade level would not be seen nearly as impressive as the gifted first grader.