Using consideRATE to Evaluate Patient Experience in a Cancer Center: Psychometric and Healthcare Assessments

BackgroundconsideRATE is a patient- and care-partner-reported measure of care experience during serious illness. We used consideRATE with patients and care partners at the Dartmouth Cancer Center to assess patient experience, evaluate psychometric properties, and explore scoring approaches. MethodsPatients and care partners aged 18+ and English proficient participated in a cross-sectional survey. Participants completed consideRATE (8 items), CANHELP-Lite (21 items), and demographic questions. Reliability was assessed using Cronbachs , and validity was evaluated with Pearsons correlations. Continuous and top-box scoring approaches were used. Psychometric properties were analyzed for patients, care partners, and subgroups with lower educational attainment or income. Results244 participants (114 patients,128 care-partners, 2 unspecified) completed the survey. consideRATE has internal reliability ( = 0.86); the correlation (r) between consideRATE continuous scoring and CANHELP Lite scores for all participants was 0.5; p<0.001, for patients 0.5; p<0.001, for care-partners 0.5; p<0.001, for patients (n=71) with lower educational attainment 0.5, p<0.001, and for patients (n=50) with lower income 0.7, p<0.001. We also found correlations between consideRATE top-box scoring and CANHELP Lite scores for all participants (rpb=0.4, p<0.001), with stronger associations among the patient (rpb=0.5, p<0.001) and lower income (rpb=0.4, p=0.005) subgroups. We found discriminant validity between consideRATE and Single-item Health Literacy (SILs) measures for continuous scoring (r = -0.05 to 0.09, p>0.05) and top-box scoring (r = -0.02 to 0.09, p>0.05). We found no significant difference in overall experience between patients with breast and blood cancer. ConclusionWe demonstrated in this sample of patients attending a cancer center that consideRATE has good internal reliability and is well correlated with CANHELP-Lite.