What is the difference between cahps and hcahps

The goal is to acknowledge and express gratitude to every patient immediately following their office visit. Patients are first thanked, and then encouraged to provide feedback relative to their visit — usually the same day or next day following their visit. Patient feedback is obtained via in-clinic devices, email, and text message. As a result, when the annual CG CAHPS survey is conducted, organizations utilizing M3-Patient Experience score higher than they would have otherwise, and thereby maximize their reimbursement.

The questionnaires have also undergone extensive cognitive testing across all population groups to reach the desired reading level. The Health Plan Survey is at a sixth grade reading level. While many Medicaid programs are mandated to provide written materials at the fourth grade reading level, the questionnaires necessarily include topics and word choices that could only be reduced to the sixth grade level.

Some of the supplemental items available for these CAHPS surveys are even more complex, and as a result have a higher reading level. The CAHPS team encourages use of layout, spacing, and type styles that optimize the readability of the survey questions. However, if you anticipate that the reading level of the survey will be a problem for your sampled population, you may want to conduct the survey over the telephone.

Learn more:. The reference period is the time period the respondent is being asked to consider when answering the question. CAHPS instruments use an explicit reference period to standardize the assessment of quality across survey respondents.

Questions that fail to make reference periods explicit leave room for the respondents to interpret the items differently. In particular, without a specified reference period, respondents with varying enrollment histories might base their answers on different periods of time. A person who has been enrolled in a health plan for 5 years could answer about the previous 5 years, while a person enrolled for 8 months could respond about those 8 months.

CAHPS surveys present the never-to-always response options in the order from "never" to "always. Putting the negative responses first yields a better distribution of responses. The research team considered four criteria to determine that the 0 to 10 rating scale compares favorably with any of the adjectival alternatives:.

The self-administered mail questionnaires are formatted so that the questions are clearly displayed and easy to read. The two-column format, white space, font type, and font size point all help to enhance readability and comprehension. Although this format means that CAHPS surveys may have more pages than survey instruments that use a smaller font and compressed spacing, the response burden is acceptable; most respondents are able to complete a survey of 50 to 65 items in about 15 minutes or less.

The CAHPS surveys use a two-column format because it reduces the number of pages in the surveys and is user-friendly. The two-column format has been tested with a variety of consumers including Medicare beneficiaries. Results show that respondents are comfortable using the two-column format to complete the CAHPS surveys. The number of Spanish speakers in the United States was a factor in the decision to produce a Spanish-language translation of the surveys.

According to U. A second factor was that the questionnaires and other materials could be translated into Spanish using terms that are understood by almost all Spanish speakers, including those who speak different dialects. This is not the case with other languages. You can learn about a recommended process involving parallel translations and a translation review committee.

You can also read about the roles of the translators and the translation reviewer, the qualifications that each should have, and the process of selecting individuals or translation firms to fulfill these roles. Please visit the CMS websites for those surveys. To identify survey topics, the developers of CAHPS surveys review the relevant literature and conduct qualitative research with patients and their families, providers, and other stakeholders to determine what they think are important aspects of care.

This research typically involves focus groups and key informant interviews. CAHPS surveys do not attempt to collect information that can be gathered more accurately through other means e.

The survey developers also focus on identifying issues that are salient to patients and influence their decisions, such as the communication skills of providers and access to services. This exhaustive formative research produces a set of potential domains of interest and, for many domains, potential questions. The developers then confirm the appropriateness and usefulness of these domains and questions through cognitive testing and field testing of the survey.

This information typically comes from administrative records and medical charts. Although patients can report accurately about certain processes e.

The CAHPS surveys all ask at least one question about overall health excellent, very good, good, fair, poor. Some also ask a similar question about perceived mental health. Other questions are included in selected surveys for specific reasons.

Health status usually is positively related to patients' reports about their care. If units that are being compared e. Analyses conducted by the CAHPS research team show that the single question on self-reported health status alone accounts for almost all the variance in ratings of health care and health plans that can be associated with health status. Adding other items from the SF or a Chronic Condition List adds very little to the ability to adjust populations in this way.

A question about global mental health does contribute to explaining between-unit variations and thus is recommended in some CAHPS applications including the Medicare fee-for-service version of the Health Plan Survey. The CAHPS race and ethnicity items were developed by the Federal Office of Management and Budget in order to create standard measures for use by Federal agencies and others to collect uniform data on race and ethnicity.

Race and ethnicity are often used for descriptive purposes in analyses and presentations of CAHPS data. However, if you delete core items from the questionnaire i. Furthermore, analyses have shown that modifications to the survey can cause context or order effects.

That is, if you insert a question into a survey, it can alter the response pattern for the subsequent question; responses to this survey may no longer be comparable to responses to an unmodified survey.

CAHPS surveys are sponsored by a variety of healthcare organizations. In most cases, the sponsor of a CAHPS survey contracts with a vendor to administer the survey, collect the data, and analyze the results. However, the amount of time required to complete a CAHPS survey depends on the use of additional supplemental items, the medium self-administered or interviewer-administered , and the formatting. For example, the formatting of the mail questionnaires available in Word and PDF is an important design feature that makes it easier for respondents to complete the questionnaires correctly and quickly.

Survey sponsors often express concern that longer survey instruments yield significantly diminished response rates. Research conducted by members of the CAHPS team and others indicates only negligible loss in response rates in longer surveys. This approach tends to result in higher response rates than any single method alone. In addition, the characteristics of the respondent pool yielded by this mixed mode are closer to those of the total population.

This is because the types of people who do not respond to mail surveys differ from those who do not respond to telephone surveys; in essence, the nonresponse biases balance out. For similar reasons, a mixed mode with mail or telephone follow-up is also recommended after a web administration. Personal interviews are generally more expensive, but they may be necessary to gather information from certain populations in specific healthcare settings, such as nursing home residents.

The CAHPS research team cannot recommend the use of other survey modes until the potential mode effects are better understood. The CAHPS team is continuing to assess the feasibility of other techniques and the possibility of mode adjustments to compensate for differences. Learn more in a summary of a research meeting on advances in survey methodology.

Web-based surveying is an increasingly popular mode of survey administration given its cost-effectiveness. However, the CAHPS research team has found that healthcare organizations are unlikely to have valid email addresses for a representative portion of their patient or enrollee population. Further, research indicates that a web-based administration, by itself, of CAHPS surveys consistently yields the lowest response rates.

Therefore, to minimize nonresponse bias and increase response rates, web administration is currently recommended only as part of a mixed mode protocol. The goal is to get enough responses to generate scores that have sufficient precision reliability to allow you to identify meaningful differences in the data.

For the Health Plan Survey, for example, the guidance suggests aiming for completed questionnaires for each health plan product. The target number of completed surveys recommended in the survey administration guidance is based on the number of completed surveys needed for the majority of survey users to achieve reliability of 0. Accessed November 5, Content last reviewed December Browse Topics. Topics A-Z. Quality and Disparities Report Latest available findings on quality of and access to health care.

People Powered Data for business. Solutions for teams. Explore more survey types. Curiosity at Work. Help Center. Log in Sign up. Get started. Consumers and patients have identified such surveys as being important. The CAHPS program devotes substantial resources to identifying and confirming the issues that matter to consumers and influence their healthcare decisions. CAHPS surveys do not attempt to collect information that can be gathered more effectively through other means e.

Patient or customer satisfaction programs. Measure your progress against long-term patient or client satisfaction goals.