Measuring Patient Experiences of Integration in Health Care Delivery: Psychometric Validation of IntegRATE Under Controlled Conditions.

The objective of this study was to assess the psychometric properties of IntegRATE-a 4-item patient-reported measure of integration in health care delivery-under controlled conditions. Adults who reported having received health care in the previous year were exposed to a fictional health care scenario featuring good, mixed, or poor integration on 1 or 2 occasions. They were then asked to imagine themselves as a patient in the scenario and complete IntegRATE and other measures. The data collected were analyzed to assess the discriminative, concurrent, and divergent validity of IntegRATE and its test-retest reliability and responsiveness using both "sum score" and "top score" scoring approaches. Six-hundred people participated in the study with 190 taking part on 2 occasions. The IntegRATE sum score demonstrated discriminative validity, concurrent validity, divergent validity, and responsiveness and partially demonstrated test-retest reliability. The IntegRATE top score demonstrated concurrent validity, divergent validity, and responsiveness and partially demonstrated discriminative validity and test-retest reliability. We conclude that the IntegRATE sum score exhibits encouraging psychometric properties and performs more optimally than the IntegRATE top score.