Patient experience
What is the source of the data used in the patient-experience Ratings?
It comes from a survey of millions of patients regarding recent hospital stays. The survey, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, or HCAHPS, was developed by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
How often are the patient-experience Ratings updated?
Four times a year, based on the federal government's quarterly updates of patient survey results. There's about a ten-month lag between the time the survey is conducted and when the government releases the results. For example, the government's August 2011 release covers patients' experiences in the 12-month period ending September 2010. We update our Ratings soon after the government does.
What do the patient-experience scores mean?
We rate overall patient experience based on the average responses to two survey questions:
- The percentage of respondents who said they would "definitely" recommend the hospital.
- The percentage of respondents who gave the hospital an overall rating of 9 or 10 on a scale of 0 to 10.
In addition, we rate specific measures of patient experience based on answers to questions about:
- Communication about discharge and medications
- Doctor-patient and nurse-patient communication
- Pain control
- Receiving help when needed
- Keeping hospital rooms quiet at night and keeping rooms and bathroom clean.
For discharge instructions, we look at the percentage of patients who said they received information before being discharged from a hospital. For all other measures, we calculate the percentage of respondents who said "always" or "usually" in response to the survey questions. (For example, 92 percent of respondents reported that their doctors always or usually communicated well.)
Why doesn't my hospital have a patient-experience Rating?
We exclude hospitals that report fewer than 100 completed surveys and those that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said had discrepancies in the data-collection process. In addition, children's hospitals, the Department of Defense Veterans Affairs hospitals, and certain small hospitals are not currently included in the HCAHPS survey.
What are the limitations of the patient-experience Ratings?
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services supervised the survey, including the training of survey vendors and data audits, but it hasn't made public certain aspects of the data-collection process.
For more details, see our Hospital Ratings Technical Report.
Patient outcomes
