The implementation of Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems this year, with reports of survey results linked to hospitals' inpatient market basket update, is shifting the patient satisfaction paradigm.

摘要

NDNQI, HCAHPS, NQF, HQA, AHRQ. The alphabet soup of hospital care quality assessment and improvement has many ingredients. Patient perception of care is one of the latest elements to be formally added-standardized and publicly reported-as the Centers for Medicare & Medic-aid Services (CMS) implements the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS). Patient satisfaction hasbeen surveyed in one way or another for decades. With the introduction of HCAHPS, linked to transparency and pay for performance, patient satisfaction is elevated to a key role in quality measurement. Perception is indeed the new reality in healthcare.Moving patient perception of care from a customer service focus to a quality metric that will directly impact reimbursement rates is a paradigm shift. Healthcare professionals and organizations traditionally viewed care quality in terms of objective, easily quantified struc-sumers, 2) to publicly report the survey results to create incentives for hospitals to improve their quality of care, and 3) to enhance public accountability by increasing the transparency of the quality of hospital care provided. Until HCAHPS, "apples-to-apples" comparison of data among hospitals wasn't possible because surveys and sampling methods weren't standardized.