When evaluating the quality of care and tracking outcomes over time in healthcare, it is essential to take patient experience into account. Surveys can be helpful in individual situations, but what about standardized goals and guidelines across facilities? That’s where resources like HCAHPS can help. Here’s what to know about HCAHPS and how hospitals can boost HCAHPS scores:

What is HCAHPS?

HCAHPS stands for Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems. The acronym is often pronounced “H-caps” for convenience, and it can also be called the CAHPS Hospital Survey or Hospital CAHPS. HCAHPS is a survey used to gather and measure patients’ perceptions of their hospital experiences.

It was developed by CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) and AHRQ (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) for a national, standardized, and publicly reported survey system of patient experience and satisfaction. It is one of the tools used to provide objective comparisons of hospital quality locally, regionally, and nationally.

It created the first national standard for collecting and publicly reporting information about patient experience of care in hospitals. Additional goals and benefits are enhancing transparency, elevating care standards, ensuring a standard quality of care, and improving outcomes, specifically regarding care in hospitals that receive Medicare funding. An important distinction is that it is not meant to be used to evaluate individuals or individual groups within a hospital; it is meant to measure a hospital’s overall performance when it comes to patient experience.

The HCAHPS survey is a set of 29 questions that collects feedback from adult patients who have been recently discharged from hospitals that accept Medicare funding. Questions collect information about patient experience and measure patient satisfaction across several critical categories of care, including:

• Cleanliness of the facility
• Quietness of the facility
• Communication with doctors and nurses
• Responsiveness of hospital staff throughout the stay
• Communication about medications
• Information about discharge and care transition processes

Why Does HCAHPS Matter?

These are some of the main reasons HCAHPS and HCAPHS scores matter for the public and for hospitals:

1. It provides a standardized, national method to measure patient perceptions of care in hospitals.
2. It establishes a uniform, objective standard for measuring performance in hospitals across the United States.
3. It supports transparency and accountability with publicly published results.
4. This allows the public to review and compare hospitals on quality of care, based on real patient feedback.
5. Results help identify gaps in care and drive ongoing quality improvements.
6. It enhances the focus on patient-centered care and improving key aspects of the patient experience.
7. HCAHPS scores are tied to Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) programs, which affect Medicare reimbursement rates for hospitals.
8. Financial incentives tied to patient satisfaction prioritize continued improvements to deliver better quality of care and better clinical outcomes.

7 Ways Hospitals Can Boost HCAHPS Scores

Providing quality care, improving patient safety, and delivering better outcomes are goals in any good healthcare facility. Making improvements to continuously deliver on those goals often results in higher HCAHPS scores, which benefits patients and hospitals. It also means patients are more likely to choose your facility for care when they are comparing hospitals. Here are some ways hospitals can boost HCAHPS scores:

1. Take a proactive approach to patient care.
2. Facilitate rapid response times to patient calls.
3. Manage alerts and notifications to minimize distractions.
4. Use sound masking to reduce noise and increase privacy.
5. Streamline and improve care communications during stays.
6. Improve communication about critical test results and care coordination.
7. Enhance and streamline the discharge process.

1. Take a Proactive Approach to Patient Care

A core strategy for improving patient care, and HCAHPS scores as a result, is to be as proactive as possible about patient care. Implementing a proactive rounding process with staff builds in regular rounds that give staff the ability to check in and anticipate patient needs.

This can help reduce the need for patient calls while reducing patient anxiety and improving their experience and satisfaction. Even something like hourly rounds can make a big difference in more proactive patient care and a more positive patient experience.

2. Facilitate Rapid Response Times to Patient Calls

Poor communication negatively affects both the speed and quality of patient care. In critical moments, poor communication leads to serious consequences. This is why communication and responsiveness are key aspects of good patient care and are topics addressed in HCAHPS surveys, hospital security assessments, and more.

Anything you can do in your hospital to improve response times to patient calls, without putting undue stress on your staff, will be a benefit to your facility. Not only can this help improve overall care, but it can also improve patient satisfaction, which can help boost HCAHPS scores. Modern nurse call systems are designed to better manage the flow of alerts and calls to improve staff efficiency and reduce response times.

A good nurse call system eliminates manual and time-consuming steps between an alert and a response. Leveraging software to categorize, organize, prioritize, and send notifications directly to the people who need to receive them gives staff the resources to facilitate rapid response to patient calls. The right software, various call point options, scalability, customization, integration, and more are essential components of a nurse call system.

3. Manage Alerts and Notifications to Minimize Distractions

Hospitals tend to be noisy environments. There is a lot of equipment, and there are a lot of people moving around. Without management, alerts and notifications can be distracting and overwhelming. Alarm fatigue negatively affects hospital staff and negatively impacts patient experience.

For patients, it’s hard to get the rest they need when there are constant disruptions or multiple distractions. Leveraging the capabilities of your nurse call and communications systems to better manage alerts and notifications to minimize excess noise and distractions improves patient experience. It can also help reduce false alarms and combat alarm fatigue in healthcare facilities, which benefits patients and staff.

4. Use Sound Masking to Reduce Noise and Increase Privacy

Better managing alerts and notifications can reduce noise from alerting devices and call systems, but it doesn’t address the general noise from people, conversations, and general hospital activity outside a patient’s room.

For a quieter patient room, sound masking can be used to reduce noise from outside the room and also increase privacy for conversations within the room. This helps create a quieter environment that facilitates better sleep, more rest, and more relaxation, which can improve patient satisfaction and support better care, better healing, and better outcomes.

5. Streamline and Improve Care Communications During Stays

During a hospital stay, even if it’s just an overnight stay, a patient may have interactions with multiple staff members across shifts. Delivering quality care across various clinical and non-clinical staff members requires communication systems and records that keep care consistent and care communications efficient for everyone involved.

An effective patient engagement solution creates a single, integrated, and comprehensive platform that streamlines care communications among staff and with the patient. This ensures nothing gets lost or left out across different members of the care team and improves care communications for better patient care, experience, and satisfaction. It can also help improve nurse call workflows & increase staff efficiency, while benefitting the patient experience.

6. Improve Communication About Critical Test Results and Care Coordination

Delays in delivering critical test results can also delay care, which can negatively impact patient experience and clinical outcomes. Poor or frustrating communication about test results and when coordinating care can also decrease patient satisfaction.

Streamlining notifications for critical test results to remove barriers or delays between labs and clinical staff and improving communication of and about results to patients can make a big difference. Closed-loop communication systems, secure messaging, and integrated patient engagement solutions can help facilitate faster and better communications about test results across all touchpoints.

7. Enhance and Streamline the Discharge Process

Other key aspects of the HCAHPS survey are questions about the discharge process. Patients expect a smooth, efficient discharge with good communication of all the information they need outside of the hospital.

Communication breakdowns, lengthy discharge waits, or clunky, disorganized, or complicated discharge processes contribute to poor patient experience and increase patient frustration. Not only does this reduce their quality of care, but it also usually results in lower HCAHPS scores. Instead, take steps to streamline the discharge process and enhance the communication of discharge information and ongoing care instructions.

A comprehensive communications system with secure messaging, like an integrated patient engagement solution, can streamline everything from clinician approval of discharge to scheduling follow-up appointments or coordinating transportation services with other clinical and non-clinical staff on the team. This helps make sure that patients receive the care they need, from start to finish, and leave with a positive experience, which is usually reflected in higher HCAHPS scores.

Deliver Optimal Patient Experience in Your Hospital With Northeast Protection Partners

Prioritizing patient experience and delivering a high quality of care drives better outcomes and lowers readmission rates where possible. This is also how hospitals can boost HCAHPS scores. Seamlessly integrated security and communications systems, including access control, nurse call, fall monitoring, and more, can help your hospital deliver an optimal patient experience. If you need to add or upgrade your healthcare security solution, contact Northeast Protection Partners at 1-800-736-1456.