Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems(HCAHPS) Scores

Patient Experience and Patient Satisfaction go hand in hand. Patient Experience is not only related to the experience that a patient has within a hospital but also how they interact with the hospital after discharge, how they participate in their own care along with the care team and how they are able to communicate with the hospital, etc. So considering all these factors, to provide a rich patient experience is not easy. All it takes is one error for a bad patient experience, throughout the entire cycle of care, leading to bad PR. How can hospitals improve and provide better patient experience? To start, they need to know where they stand. The HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) Survey is the first national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patients’ perspectives of hospital care.

HCAHPS is a reporting requirement for most hospitals and the data is made public. The scores definitely help the bottom line as more and more patients are looking at the scores before they choose a particular hospital for care. Many hospitals also focus on improving their patient experience efforts by improving the HCAHPS scores and that is how they measure the success of their patient experience improvement initiatives.

With healthcare being delivered in a variety of settings and more often delivered in outpatient environments, it is important to know what patients think of their care provider after they leave the hospital. Many hospitals believe that the experiences their patients have at outpatient facilities are very important for growth as they are a crucial market differentiator. With the Accountable Care Act focused on Value than Volume, having a good HCAHPS score is critical for any hospital’s bottom line.