Welcome
December 2009
Welcome again to
HCAHPS Executive Insight, the gold button on
www.hcahpsonline.org.
In December the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) refreshed the
HCAHPS results on the
Hospital Compare Web site (
www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov).
This is the eighth time that HCAHPS results have been publicly reported. The new
HCAHPS results are based on patients discharged between April 2008 and March 2009.
Some highlights include:
- The number of hospitals reporting their HCAHPS results has increased by 1,245 (49%)
since the first public reporting in March 2008
- The December 2009 results are based on 2.3 million completed surveys from 3,766
hospitals
- We rolled off HCAHPS data from First Quarter 2008, while rolling on data from First
Quarter 2009
A summary table of state and national HCAHPS results, and information on how to
interpret them, can be found below at
Summary of HCAHPS Results.
News and Notes from the HCAHPS Project Team
To promote further insight into patient experience of hospital care, this month
we've added a new feature exclusive to
HCAHPS Executive Insight: inter-correlations
of the ten publicly reported HCAHPS measures:
Patient-Level Correlations of "Top-Box" HCAHPS Scores.
These patient-level Pearson correlations are based on 2.2 million completed surveys
from patients discharged between July 2007 and June 2008 (scores publicly reported
in March 2009).
The patient-level correlations are for the "top-box," or most positive, response
of HCAHPS measures. The top-box response category is "
Always" for five HCAHPS
composites ("Communication with Nurses," "Communication with Doctors," "Responsiveness
of Hospital Staff," "Pain Management," and "Communication about Medicines") and
two individual measures ("Cleanliness of Hospital Environment" and "Quietness of
Hospital Environment"). The top-box response is "
Yes" for the sixth composite,
"Discharge Information," "
9 or 10" for the "Overall Hospital Rating" item,
and "
Definitely recommend" for the "Recommend the Hospital" item.
The new table of patient-level, inter-item correlations can be helpful in quality
improvement efforts by identifying "key drivers." For instance, "key driver" analyses
sometimes use patient-level associations to predict global items, such as ratings
and recommendations, from more specific patient experience measures, such as composites
and stand-alone items. We plan to refresh the patient-level correlation matrix at
the time of the March 2010 public reporting of HCAHPS results on Hospital Compare.
In September we introduced the
HCAHPS Top-Box Percentiles table to make it easier
to understand where hospitals stand on each of the ten publicly reported HCAHPS
measures. In December we refreshed this table using the most recent HCAHPS scores.
This table displays the national "top-box," or most positive response category,
scores for the 5
th, 25
th, 50
th, 75
th, and 95
th percentiles of hospitals whose HCAHPS
results were publicly reported on Hospital Compare in December 2009.
Since CMS first released HCAHPS results in March 2008, HCAHPS scores have appeared
in a wide variety of publications and have been incorporated in a number of hospital
rating tools. We are pleased that the value of HCAHPS is being acknowledged by others,
but would like to note that the full, complete and official HCAHPS results are those
publicly reported on Hospital Compare. Hospital Compare (
www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov),
the website on which the official HCAHPS scores are publicly reported, has had an
average of 1.14 million page views per month in 2009.
CMS and the HCAHPS Project Team continue to analyze HCAHPS data. Recently we published
several research papers in the journal
Medical Care Research and Review.
To make locating our HCAHPS research easier, in this issue of HEI we also introduce
a
bibliography
of publications from the HCAHPS Project Team.
As ever, we encourage both hospitals and their survey vendors to be well aware of
the dates for data submission. For the latest, please see
Key Upcoming
Date below.
We invite you to share (and re-share) the material presented on
HCAHPS Executive
Insight. When you do, please include the following citation:
Thanks for visiting
HCAHPS Executive Insight, and please continue to do
so as we update and add new content. If you have any comments or suggestions for
HEI, please send us an email at
hcahps@azqio.sdps.org.
Bill Lehrman and Liz Goldstein, Co-editors
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
Key Upcoming Date
Data collected for the HCAHPS survey must be submitted to the HCAHPS warehouse,
via My QualityNet, by or before the deadline posted on the HCAHPS Web site. It is
imperative that data be submitted correctly by the deadline in order for
hospitals to meet RHQDAPU requirements. Once the warehouse closes, data cannot be
submitted or changed in any way. CMS strongly suggests that data be submitted
at least 48 hours prior to the deadline, which should allow time for resubmission
if there were an error in the original submission. Hospitals are strongly encouraged
to promptly inspect their Data Submission Report and/or HCAHPS Feedback
Reports to confirm their data were accepted into the data warehouse.
Reminder: The deadline for submission of HCAHPS data for October, November and December 2009 discharges is April 14, 2010.
Summary of HCAHPS Results
A summary table of HCAHPS results for patients discharged between April 2008 and
March 2009 is available through the link below. This table contains the average
scores of participating hospitals in the most positive, or "top box," category for
each of the ten publicly reported HCAHPS measures. For example, the column labeled
"Comm. with Nurses" displays the percent of patients who reported that their
nurses
"Always" communicated well. Also shown is the number of participating
hospitals and the survey response rate for hospitals in each state and in the nation.
To view and/or download the table please click
here. Summary results from all previous HCAHPS
public reporting can be found below in the Archive section.
To view the full set of current results on each HCAHPS measure, and find brief information
on survey administration, methodology, etc., please visit the
"Survey of Patients'
Hospital Experiences" section of the
Hospital Compare website
(
http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/Hospital)
Archive: Summary Table of HCAHPS Results
Date of Public Reporting Months Included
Archive: HCAHPS Percentiles