HCAHPS

How healthcare communications impact HCAHPS scores

In 2002, CMS and AHRQ developed and tested the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey. The first national standard for collecting patients' perspectives about their inpatient care, HCAHPS has three primary goals:

1. Produce data consumers can use to make objective, meaningful comparisons of hospitals.
2. Create incentives for hospitals to improve quality of care.
3. Enhance hospital accountability for quality of care relative to cost.

HCAHPS’ core questions address three key aspects of the hospital experience: communication with nurses and doctors, staff responsiveness and hospital environment quietness and cleanliness. With a secure healthcare communications platform, your organization can address them, too.

Improve patient experience, increase HCAHPS scores, and maximize reimbursements with secure communications

Secure communications helps your organization improve the patient and provider experience by:

• Enhancing the efficiency of clinical communications and care coordination, replacing pagers with secure text, photo and group messaging across any desktop or device.
• Eliminating inefficient workflows caused by outdated pager technologies, improving provider satisfaction with a protected, easy to use messaging platform.
• Safeguarding PHI in accordance with HIPAA regulations, eliminating providers’ need to decide between speed of communication and legal risk.

Secure messaging helps your organization increase HCAHPS scores by improving:

• Communication with nurses and doctors via an efficient communication platform that enables nurses and clinical staff to find physicians easily.
• Staff responsiveness with group messaging and acknowledgement receipts to providers, no matter where they are.
• Hospital environment quietness with secure mobile and desktop communications that replace overhead paging, and enable nurses and clinical staff to collaborate quickly and quietly.

A secure communications platform helps your organization maximize reimbursements by:

• Coordinating care across employed and affiliated providers, and multiple healthcare organizations, reducing readmissions and their associated penalties
• Increasing HCAHPS scores, ensuring full quality-based payment returns
• Reducing duplicative procedures, readmissions and lengths of stay.