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The health authorities in France recently produced and made publicly available a wide array of regularly updated hospital care quality measures (www.scopesante.fr). Economic theory applied to healthcare markets predicts that monitoring costs incurred by the health authorities (the principal) to signal the quality of hospitals (the agent) should create incentives for the latter to improve their quality and safety indicators (QSIs). However, patients rarely refer to technical quality information when choosing between hospitals. They are more likely to use subjective appraisals (such as word-of-mouth), of which patient satisfaction is a proxy. Using a unique dataset of 2,323 hospitals in France, and overcoming sample selection issues, we found a strong and positive correlation between a standardized measure of patient satisfaction ( e-satis) and various measures of QSIs. Our results suggest that, since patients use a signal that carries information about quality, hospitals could be encouraged to increase healthcare quality. JEL codes: I18, L25, C34