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Background As part of the Hospital Quality Initiative, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) developed the Hospital CAHPS (HCAHPS) survey. HCAHPS’ has three goals, as defined by CMS: - The survey is designed to produce comparable data on the patient's perspective of care that allows objective and meaningful comparisons between hospitals on domains that are important to consumers.
- Public reporting of the survey results is designed to create incentives for hospitals to improve their quality of care.
- Public reporting will serve to enhance public accountability in health care by increasing the transparency of the quality of hospital care provided in return for the public investment.
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CMS' Quick Facts About HCAHPS The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have listed the following points as "Quick Facts About HCAHPS" on http://www.hcahps.org/: - HCAHPS will result in the first truly national, standardized, publicly reported benchmark of hospital patients' perspectives of their care.
- All short-term, acute care, non-specialty, non-critical access hospitals are encouraged to participate.
- Hospitals may use an approved survey vendor or collect their own HCAHPS data if they have prior experience collecting patient surveys.
- Hospitals can choose to conduct the survey in one of four modes: mail, telephone, mail with telephone follow-up, or active IVR.
- Hospitals may either integrate the HCAHPS items with their own patient survey or implement HCAHPS as a separate, stand-alone survey.
- The survey will be administered to a random sample of live discharges who were 18 or older at admission, had an inpatient overnight stay, and had a non-psychiatric diagnosis.
- Hospitals should survey patients through each month and submit the data to CMS, or have their approved vendor survey and submit the data, on a monthly or quarterly basis.
- Hospitals and their survey vendors must be registered users of QualityNet Exchange.
- CMS will adjust HCAHPS data for mode and patient-mix effects prior to public reporting.
- Hospitals may preview their HCAHPS results prior to public reporting.
- Hospitals can maintain and analyze a copy of their HCAHPS data; however, the "official" HCAHPS results will be reported on the Hospital Compare Website.
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