The patient judgment system: reliability and validity.

Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) recently developed a patient judgment system (PJS) that generates information for monitoring long-term trends in hospital quality. Central to the system is a 68-item questionnaire that includes 11 quality scales. To test the questionnaire's reliability, validity, and representativeness, completed questionnaires from 5,625 patients from 32 hospitals were analyzed. Findings showed uniformly high patient-level reliabilities, good to excellent hospital-level reliabilities, and strong empirical support for the validity of the questionnaire's quality measures.