There are a seemingly endless number of acronyms in health care. Some (like the FDA, CDC or AMA) are more recognizable than others (such as AHCA, FHA or CON).
Now there’s a new one coming out that healthcare providers will likely recognize, but may just be another alphabet soup for the general public. It’s called HCAHPS and it stands for (take a deep breath) Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems.
It sounds very impressive…but what is it?
In essence, it’s a tool to measure patient perceptions of the care they receive when they stay at a hospital. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services created the program as a way to gather information on how hospitals were doing in caring for patients.
A survey is provided to patients, who answer questions about: how doctors and nurses communicated with them; whether the hospital staff was responsive; how their pain was controlled; whether they were communicated with about their medications; was the physical environment clean and quiet; did they receive the proper discharge information. The results of the patient surveys are then sent to a third-party vendor and collated.
The process of this program allows the hospitals to be compared to each other accurately. In the past, many hospitals used customer satisfaction surveys to measure themselves, but because the same questions weren’t always asked, the comparisons might not have been exact.
The new program is important for hospitals because in the near future, their rates of reimbursement from the government will be tied to their HCAHPS scores. And while that’s certainly an incentive, the ultimate goal is to make sure our patients are satisfied with their visits.
As of March 28, the results for each hospital are available online at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov. Those results will be published on a quarterly basis.
In the meantime, start brushing up on your healthcare acronyms. You never know when they’ll come in handy.
--Maureen Gritz
Director of Quality Management Resources
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