Patient feedback is crucial for those healthcare organizations that are truly committed to improving the patient experience.
During a June Becker's Hospital Review podcast sponsored by NRC Health, Susan Edgman-Levitan, executive director of the John D. Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and Kayce Kovanda, corporate compliance communications manager at NRC Health, discussed upcoming changes to the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey, the anticipated impact of those changes and best practices for adapting and maximizing the impact of these changes.
Three key insights were:
1. CMS is limiting the number of questions on the HCAHPS survey to 12. This change is intended to align HCAHPS with CMS's other patient experience surveys in only seeking feedback on matters that are critical from a patient experience perspective. By using a condensed survey, hospitals can improve response rates, particularly from patients that have previously been underrepresented in survey research.
"In some instances, people add many more items to HCAHPS and that affects the quality of the data, the response rates and the populations we're hearing from," said Ms. Edgman-Levitan, whose organization works with primary care practices on patient experience improvement.
HCA Health is working with organizations that are administering the current (longer) HCAHPS survey to identify which questions can be eliminated or reframed. The goal, Ms. Kovanda said, is to keep only questions that are most impactful to organizations. "I think this is going to be a very positive change."
2. Another important change to HCAHPS is the data collection period is being extended. Extending the data collection period also aims to improve response rates, particularly for people who may have had negative experiences and who may be hesitant to provide feedback or who may be late in responding, if they do it at all.
"There are a lot of conflicting feelings about saying negative things about care you received, and there's also worry about anonymity and that if you say negative things, your care might get worse the next time," Ms. Edman-Levitan said.
Ms. Kovanda noted that younger patients tend to respond late to surveys, so the change will allow capturing more of their responses, too.
3. For maximum impact, hospitals and health systems are encouraged to follow best practices. The primary goal of the updated HCAHPS survey is to improve response rates. There are additional actions that organizations can take to help achieve that goal. They include:
- Correctly capturing patients' email addresses that are used to send out the survey.
- Making sure that the cover letters that accompany the survey explain how respondents' data will be used, who will have access to it and that there will be no penalty for responding honestly. The letters should stress how much the organization values their feedback.
- Sending out the survey and the cover letter in the patients' preferred languages.