Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS)
HCAHPS® Hospital Survey
Last Updated: 11/20/2012
The Latest: HAP has garnered another opportunity to work with the American Hospital Association’s Health Research and Education Trust (HRET) in a second project to help hospitals improve their Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) results by improving quality, safety, and the patient experience of care. The HRET project is funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ). Implementation of the 2013 HCAHPS Project is scheduled to begin on December 7, 2012. Additional information about the 2013 project is available in HAP Memo 12-109.
Background: A patient’s experience of care, as measured by HCAHPS, will account for 30 percent of each Medicare inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS) hospital’s value based purchasing (VBP) score. Overall VBP scores for individual hospitals, when compared with all Medicare IPPS hospitals, will determine whether a hospital will be able to recover some, or all, of Medicare fee-for-service payments withheld for federal fiscal year 2013 (beginning October 1, 2012). For Pennsylvania IPPS hospitals, nearly $38 million dollars in Medicare payments are at risk in the first year of the VBP program. Within five years, 2 percent (approximately $90 million) of Medicare fee-for-service inpatient payments to Pennsylvania general acute care hospitals will be at risk in the VBP program.