Objectives: Patient perceptions of physician trust and respect are important factors for patient satisfaction evaluations. We aim to determine the causal effect on patient-physician demographic concordance and patient perceptions of physician trust and respect in an emergency care setting. A near real-time patient satisfaction survey was sent via telephone to patients within 72 hours of discharge from an Emergency Department (ED). Patient-trust-physician (PTP) and physician-show-respect (PSR) scores were measured. Patient and physician demographics (age, gender, race, and ethnicity) were matched. We employed genetic matching to assign patients appropriately to the treatment (demographic concordance) and control (demographic discordance) groups. Causal effect was analyzed to determine the direct effect of patient-physician demographic concordance on PTP/PSR scores.
Result: We enrolled 1815 patients. The treatment effect of patient-physician demographic concordance on patient perception of physician trust and respect ranged from -0.02 to -0.2 (p>0.05). In general, patient-physician demographic concordance has minimal effect on patient perceptions of physician trust and respect.