The Utility of Public Health Survey Validation: Assess Psychometrics as a Means of Improving Patient Outcomes

Authors

Richard A. Munoz, Florida International UniversityFollow

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Major/Program

Public Health

First Advisor's Name

Zoran Bursac

First Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Second Advisor's Name

Alejandro Arrieta

Second Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Third Advisor's Name

Jessica Adler

Third Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Fourth Advisor's Name

Cynthia LeRouge

Fourth Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Keywords

Survey validation, patient safety culture, Latin America, Veteran Affairs, validity, reliability, HERO Care

Date of Defense

5-29-2023

Abstract

In this dissertation, we discuss how population-based public health psychometric survey validation, through the lens of health systems research, can help healthcare administrators, stakeholders, and advocates, better understand various types of health factors, and how they relate to tangible real-world outcomes. The research conducted here informs health policy, with recommendations for targeted interventions that aide in ameliorating or lessening the burden of adverse outcomes, and ways to further extrapolate this work towards other health systems and populations. The first chapter champions a global health collaboration between Florida International University and over 30 hospitals within 5 Latin American countries. We collected survey data measuring patient safety culture and assessed the psychometric properties of the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality’s Version 1 Spanish-translated Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture. We also tailored five country-specific models to gauge the intersection between gains in validity versus comparable utility between Latin America regionally or within countries. The second chapter is a pilot study called the “High-Need, High-Risk”-658, which was conducted at the Miami, Florida Veteran Affairs Medical Center, where we assessed which vii factors were related to acute-care utilization measures (emergency room stays, and inpatient hospital stays). We also grouped Veterans into clinically relevant and meaningful latent classes, approximated latent class inclusion, and discovered which survey items endorsed class membership. For the last chapter, we used the lessons learned and survey items used in the pilot study to assess the cross-sectional first time-wave of data collected from the parent Home Excellence Resource Center to Advance, Redefine, and Evaluate Non-Institutional Care (HERO CARE) survey. We assessed its psychometric properties and which health factors were related to acute-care usage and unmet needs.

Identifier

FIDC010981

ORCID

0000-0001-8212-1567

Recommended Citation

Munoz, Richard A., "The Utility of Public Health Survey Validation: Assess Psychometrics as a Means of Improving Patient Outcomes" (2023). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 5166.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/5166