The HCAHPS survey, also known as CAHPS Hospital Survey, or Hospital CAHPS, is a standardized survey instrument and data collection methodology for measuring patients' perspectives of hospital care.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has partnered with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ to develop HCAHPS—the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Survey.

The purpose of HCAHPS is to uniformly measure and publicly report patient’s perspectives on their inpatient care.  While many hospitals collect information on patients’ satisfaction with care, there has previously been no national standard for collecting this information that would yield valid comparisons across all hospitals.
HCAHPS can be viewed as a core set of questions that can be combined with a customized set of hospital-specific items.  HCAHPS is meant to complement the data hospitals currently collect to support improvements in internal customer services and quality related activities.

• HCAHPS is the first truly national, standardized, publicly reported benchmark of hospital patients' perspectives of their care
• As part of the Reporting Hospital Quality Data Annual Payment Update (RHQDAPU) program, hospitals that are subject to IPPS payment provisions ("subsection (d) hospitals") must collect and submit HCAHPS data in order to receive their full IPPS annual payment update (APU) for fiscal year 2008, and forward. IPPS hospitals that fail to report the required quality measures, which include the HCAHPS survey, may receive an APU that is reduced by 2.0 percentage points
• The survey will be administered to a random sample of live discharges who were 18 or older at admission, had an inpatient overnight stay, and had a non-psychiatric diagnosis
• Patients will be surveyed throughout each month and data submitted to CMS (via QualityNet Exchange) on a quarterly basis
• Hospitals may review their HCAHPS results prior to public reporting

Communications for Research, Inc. has been assigned as an approved vendor to conduct HCAHPS surveys.

HCAHPS FAQs page

Getting started

Contact us

Complete list of HCAHPS vendors