Inpatient Satisfaction Data to Go Public
Next fall, for the first time, hospitals across the country will report publicly inpatient satisfaction data, and the collection process already has begun.
As required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), BWH started collecting inpatient satisfaction data in October using HCAHPS, a survey tool developed based on research from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and approved through a consensus process overseen by the National Quality Forum. It is expected that the data collected from October 2006 through June 2007 will appear late next fall on the Hospital Compare Web site: www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/
“This will show what we look like as far as inpatient satisfaction when compared to other like-size teaching hospitals across the country,” said Troy Tomilonus, manager of Decision Support Systems for the Center for Clinical Excellence.
BWH has preliminary data collected between October and January. “According to the data, we are better than all the benchmarks on every question, except for two on environment of care,” Tomilonus said.
Physicians have received extremely high ratings, scoring in the 91st percentile when compared to like-size teaching hospitals for the question “doctors listen carefully to you.”
The topics addressed by HCAHPS are similar to those covered by the Press Ganey reports that BWH also uses, but the HCAHPS survey uses different scales, wording and methodology. CMS and AHRQ needed to develop their own consensus tool as this is federally funded, and they could not use a vendor tool, such as Press Ganey’s.
Each year, BWH will send out 1,000 surveys in a two-wave mailing process to collect data. The responses will be broken out into three groups of patients: medical, surgical and obstetric.