Hospitals are focusing on improving the patient experience. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will be using patient feedback about their care as part of their reimbursement plan for Acute Care Hospitals. Under the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program (beginning in FY 2013 for discharges occuring on or after October 1, 2012), CMS will make value-based incentive payments to acute care hospitals, based either on how well the hospitals perform on certain quality measures or how much the hospitals’ performance improves on certain quality measures from their performance during a baseline period. The higher the score/greater the improvement, the higher the hospital’s incentive payment for that fiscal year.
Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS)
Patient feedback is being collected using a survey known as HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems). HCAHPS (pronounced “H-caps“) is a national, standardized survey of hospital patients and was developed by a partnership of public and private organizations. I recently wrote about HCAHPS in a prior post. The survey asks a random sample of recently discharged patients about important aspects of their hospital experience. The data set includes patient survey results for over 3800 US hospitals on ten measures of patients’ perspectives of care.
The data.gov site indicates that the data files were updated in 5/30/2012. Based on HCAHPS reporting schedule, it appears the current survey data were collected from Q3 2010 through Q2 2011 and represent the latest publicly available patient survey data.
Map of US Hospitals and their Patient Experience Ratings
As consumers of healthcare, you need to understand how well hospitals are delivering a good patient experience. Using the HCAHPS data, I developed a map to help you easily identify and understand how your hospital ranks in patient experience. In the map below (see Figure 1), the colors are based on the patient advocacy index I created (average of top box scores for two questions: Overall hospital quality rating and Recommend hospital. In my prior analysis, this Patient Advocacy Index (PAI) had a reliability estimate (Cronbach’s alpha) of .95, suggesting that it is a reliable measure.
The colors for each hospital are based on their PAI (red = 0 – 20; purple = 21-40; yellow = 41-60; blue = 61-80; green = 81-100). If you click on one of the buttons, you will see detailed information about the patient experience metrics (if survey data were collected for that hospital) as well as response rates, sample sizes and other notes (if available). NOTE: Some hospitals do not have any ratings (those are typically red).
- Figure 1. Map of US Hospitals and their Patient Experience Ratings
