News Releases

HSAG is becoming part of health care history by helping the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implement the first standardized consumer survey of acute-care hospitals nationwide.

The CAHPS® Hospital Survey (HCAHPS) is giving thousands of consumers who are patients at participating hospitals the opportunity to assess the quality of care they received. Their responses will form the first nationwide, apples-to-apples comparison of consumer perceptions of health care delivered at hospitals.

"Our role is to facilitate the national implementation of HCAHPS," said Laura Giordano, vice president of surveys, research, and analysis, and project director of HCAHPS. "We are responsible for the coordination and implementation of all project tasks."

HSAG was awarded the HCAHPS project based in part on its experience with the Medicare Health Outcomes Survey, which requires all managed care plans with a Medicare Advantage contract to collect health status data from Medicare beneficiaries for use in quality improvement activities.

More than 2,000 hospitals are expected to submit data for the voluntary survey, which will have results publicly reported on CMS' Hospital Compare Web site at http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov or through a link at http://www.medicare.gov.

The HCAHPS survey contains 27 questions, including 18 items that address seven key topics: nurse communication, doctor communication, responsiveness of hospital staff, cleanliness and quietness of the hospital environment, pain management, communication about medicines, and discharge information. Hospitals and survey vendors can administer the survey in four ways: by mail only, telephone only, mixed (mail followed by telephone), and through an interactive voice response system.

HSAG developed the Quality Assurance Guidelines for the survey and is responsible for training hospitals and vendors on the HCAHPS protocol. The standardized training ensures that the survey is administered properly, producing valid, reliable results and meaningful comparisons across hospitals, said Giordano.

"The goal is to improve the quality of care provided to consumers," said Giordano. "The survey will provide valuable information to consumers when choosing a hospital, it will provide hospitals with an opportunity to compare their results to other organizations, and it will provide hospitals with measures to evaluate their quality of care and initiate improvement activities."

For more information on HCAHPS, please visit, http://www.hcahpsonline.org.