New Training Video Helps Hospitals Raise HCAHPS Scores

In response to escalating interest in the first national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patients' perspectives of care, HCPro has created a training video to help hospitals attain high scores on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS).

Marblehead, MA (PRWEB) June 9, 2008 -- In response to escalating interest in the first national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patients' perspectives of care, HCPro has created a training video to help hospitals attain high scores on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS).

HCPro's video, Patient Satisfaction Success: Six Essential Steps to Boost HCAHPS Performance (http://www.hcmarketplace.com/Prod.cfm?id=6402) gives specific examples of behaviors to avoid, and covers five key areas most closely linked by experts to overall performance.

HCAHPS (pronounced "H-caps") provides a standardized data collection methodology to measure how satisfied patients are with their hospital care. The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently placed ads in 58 major daily newspapers to promote Hospital Compare (http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov), a Web site that allows patients to see how their hospital stacks up against others. The ads provide scores from two of the 26 quality and patient satisfaction measures on the Web site for a sample of hospitals in the newspapers' areas.

Hospitals now must also report HCAHPS data to the federal government, or forfeit 2% of their Medicare payment update. The scrutiny is only going to get more intense, experts say. Federal officials have proposed using HCAHPS as part of a hospital's overall performance score in the value-based purchasing plan now under consideration on Capitol Hill.

"Recent trends in healthcare--competition, transparency, quality mandates, changes in insurance--all put more power in the hands of healthcare consumers," according to Deirdre Mylod, Ph.D, vice president of public policy at Press Ganey Associates, Inc. "For healthcare leaders, it is more important than ever to hear and act on their voices. Hospitals working to improve patient satisfaction will be able to capitalize on this competitive advantage." Press Ganey, based in South Bend, IN, works with more than 7,000 healthcare facilities--including more than 40% of U.S. hospitals--to measure and improve the quality of their care and their bottom line.

# # #