Hospital Consumer Assessment Of Healthcare Providers And Systems

The reason for the controversy of the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers & Systems, referred to as HCAHPS (pronounced “H-caps”), is the tie that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) placed between the scores of the assessment and healthcare reimbursement (Westbrook, Babakus, & Grant, 2014). There are two sides to consider when addressing HCAHPS/Press Ganey surveys as they directly affect hospital reimbursement. Patient satisfaction, quality of care, and how they portray their hospital stay contributes to the reimbursement that hospital receives. The nurse-patient relationship plays a large role in influencing the quality of care than patients feel that they are receiving.

Background

During the late 1970’s, Dr. Irwin Press, PhD, became interested in how patients’ social, emotional, and cultural needs relate and compare to their clinical care needs. He wanted to know if these comprehensive needs were being met by hospitals, and also whether or not meeting these needs improved overall care and decreased health care claims (History & Mission, 2015). After joining forces with Dr. Rod Ganey, PhD, an expert in statistics and survey methodology, Press Ganey Associates was formed (History & Mission, 2015). This company is the distributor of the Press Ganey Patient Satisfaction Survey, a highly ridiculed (Zusman, 2012) patient satisfaction survey. According to Zusman (2012), this survey was distributed to 40% of hospitals in the United States. As of the 2010 implementation of the Affordable Care Act, value-based purchasing initiative is now required for Medicare and Medicaid patients. The survey that was chosen to replace the Press Ganey Patient Satisfaction Survey and represent patients’ experience in the...

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...d Vogus, 2014). However, Kennedy (2015) points out that, in reality, with measuring perceptions, as long as the patient believes the healthcare provider is having compassion and doing as much as they could for the pain, the patient will report well on the survey.

Patient satisfaction surveys have been in debate being that the concept of ‘patient satisfaction’ is not clear and because this term means something different to everyone (Junewicz & Youngner, 2015). However, Junewicz and Younger (2015) discuss how these surveys can improve aspects of a patient’s care such as humanism, communication, safety, and confidentiality. The part that is still not covered is that these aspects patient satisfaction has no clear relationship with the technical quality of healthcare such as nosocomial infections, surgical complications, and readmission rates (Junewicz & Youngner, 2015).