Strategy to Improve HCAHPS Scores Starts With Effective Communication and Employee Awareness.
Since the beginning of 2008 patient attention and competition from the health care business has never been more important or measured. From enhanced patient care to hospital incentives and aggressive placement, the significance of high scores is as crucial as ever.
While a powerful focus on proper care and effective communication with patients has been put with individual surveys internal focus needs to also be placed by how HCAHPS importance is being communicated internally with the hospital personnel.
The reality is that with no complete consciousness and a willingness by all staff to concentrate on patient care satisfaction high scores could only be achieved unintentionally.
The very first step in enhancing scores (and all these are really basics) is creating a hospital wide and total comprehension of just what is being measured by patients. Using internal communication to create hospital employee awareness of how every hospital staff member plays a critical role in scoring is overriding.
To make that awareness and ultimately create position specific accountability requires a communication strategy which not only supplies hospital staff adequate comprehension of how hospitals are being measured but also creates a culture of individual obligation to do their role in producing the ideal patient experience.
Like any other internal communication vehicle there are defects. In the worker who might not have obtained the information to the employee who is not be accessible when material needs to be assessed and the employee who simply just not understand the significance... Any vehicle for hospital communication ought to have measurement of readership and acknowledgement functionality in addition to the capacity to measure employee understanding of internal initiatives or policies concerning patient care.
Besides broadcasting"What you want to know concerning HCAHPS" an instrument for quantifying a hospitals employee's level of comprehension of HCAHPS is crucial. Normal testing and discovery of knowledge gaps is a valuable tool to improve scores at any given position in any hospital.