The HCAHPS system is not just supposed to compare and inform about hospitals. The fact of the matter is that medicare has integrated the HCAHPS results into their worth based purchasing system, which directly joins hospital's reimbursement payments to their patient experience scores. For most hospitals in the United States this represents between $300.000 and $2.000.000 a year in earnings received from medicare.
As you can see, this isn't a trivial issue for hospital management. The fact remains that enhancing HCAHPS scores is a major priority for health care organizations.
If your objective is to establish your organization as"Hospital of Choice" in your area, it is vital that you launch a realtime patient satisfaction measurement application. This program will allow you to integrate patient satisfaction monitoring into your everyday interactions with patients. This way you'll be able to find problems and implement adjustments before they can affect your official HCAHPS scores.
To describe why this continuous measuring is so important, you need to understand that the HCAHPS procedure. This government backed survey tool is administered to a small sample of discharged patients that fulfill the approved HCAHPS criteria. The minimum acceptable sample size is only 300 patients per year.
Although most organizations may transcend this sample size, it's clear that the number of patients surveyed is comparatively small when compared with the entire population of discharges. Just a few discontented patients which happen to fall in the sample may provoke a substantial fall in the entire HCAHPs scores.
If you put your realtime satisfaction information in the hands of frontline managers, you are creating an immensely strong atmosphere for continuous improvement. Problems can be detected quickly and corrective measures can be chosen in on the fly. A couple of hours after, your team will be verifying if the measures have produced the desired response.
The idea of truly realtime measurement of patient satisfaction was not possible until quite recently. Thanks to an innovative new technologies hospitals can now monitor patient satisfaction easily and affordably within the daily in hospital routines. Patients answer fast surveys by touching the display of the portable"gustometer" using their fingers right in their own rooms. Considering that the entire survey procedure usually takes about a minute and a half, the usage of the gustometer may be integrated into the standard day to day interactions with your patients. Once done the survey is automatically collected by the program's servers, tabulated and prepared for analysis.
More importantly the instrument incorporates a very sophisticated business intelligence system that will let you extract the maximum value from your survey data. You'll be able to contrast your customized profile queries with the outcomes of each valuation question. It also lets you adapt your surveys on the fly to structure your surveys in a manner which guarantees high participation rates.