Five ways to significantly improve your HCAHPS scores.
In 2006 a countrywide system for measuring patient satisfaction in hospitals was launched by the U.S Department of Health and Human Services. Called HCAHPS, this initiative uses a standard patient experience survey to measure and benchmark hospitals from all over the country. For the first time in March, 2008 the results of the survey were made available to the general public through the website www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov. Here you can compare the patient satisfaction scores for any hospital participating in the program.
But the HCAHPS system isn’t just designed to compare and inform about hospitals. The truth of the matter is that medicare has incorporated the HCAHPS results into their value based purchasing system, which directly links 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 revenue received from medicare.
Obviously improving HCAHPs scores is a high priority for hospitals across the country.
The following five strategic initiatives have been proven to be effective catalysts for raising HCAHPS scores:
Implement a Daily Measurement System The core of any HCAHPS improvement system should be a realtime daily measurement system. In order to guarantee optimum yearly results you need to be tracking and improving your patient experience on continuous basis. This is the only way to effectively detect and correct problems before they can have a significant impact on your official HCAHPS scores.
Empower Frontline Managers You can’t improve patient satisfaction from the boardroom. Although top management must drive these initiatives, it is essential to push critical patient satisfaction data to the front line managers on a weekly basis. After all, they’re the ones in direct contact with the patients and need to have available the correct tools.
Identify and Focus on difficult demographic groups An effective measurement system will not only provide constant updates on patient satisfaction but will be able to rapidly identify the least satisfied patient groups. These may be due to problems in specific departments or hospital services, or may reflect different expectations by varying demographic groups. Although we all love to receive positive feedback, from a management standpoint we must identify the problem areas in order to put emphasis on fixing the most important problems first.
Make physician satisfaction a priority Hospitals and physicians are inextricably linked together. If you have a team of happy, motivated and valued physicians on board they will transmit this to your patients. However, if your physicians are at best “moving along” they will also transmit their apathy to your patients. It is well known that a 1% increase in staff morale will provoke a 2% increase in patient satisfaction. Use this leverage to your benefit and design a program for improving and maintaining high levels of physician satisfaction.
Keep nurse attrition rates under control After doctors, nurses are the second most important professional group in any hospital (many actually believe that it’s the other way around). if you take into account the growing shortage of qualified nurses and the aggressive recruiting tactics used in the market, you can easily see how nurse attrition rates can get out of hand. This rate will directly affect your HCAHPS scores, as nursing care figures very prominently in the survey. Put in place, a well designed program for keeping your nurses happy and on the job.
Finally I’d like to recommend a truly innovative new tool called Gustometria, which can make these five strategic initiative much easier and affordable. Patients answer quick surveys by touching the screen of the portable “gustometer” with their fingers right in their rooms. Since the entire survey process usually takes about a minute and a half, the use of the gustometer can be incorporated into the normal day to day interactions with your customers. Once completed the survey is automatically collected by the Gustometria servers, tabulated and ready for analysis.
More importantly Gustometria incorporates a very sophisticated business intelligence system which will allow you to extract the maximum value from your survey data. You will be able to contrast your custom profile questions with the results of each valuation question. Gustometria also allows you to adapt your surveys on the fly an to structure your surveys in a way which assures high participation rates.
This simple and affordable solution can be up and running in less than a week, and will provide you with valuable information that you couldn’t acquire any other way.
Pick up the phone and call Gustometria toll free at 1-877-448-7865.