Understanding the HCAHPS Survey for Health Care Providers.

Since 2017, the South African Government implemented Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) surveys within hospitals, clinics and community health centres to increase the quality of care for all citizens. In this article, we unpack the questions in the five sections of HCAHPS to help give you a better understanding of the information it gathers.  

As you may know as a Quality Assurance Officer or Patient Experience Officer, a full HCAHPS survey is required once per year at minimum. For healthcare facilities that want to remain top of mind as partners for the larger health insurance companies, you may want to conduct regular surveys to maintain good standards of care and service delivery for the insurance agencies and your patients.  

What Are the Criteria of HCAHPS?  

According to the National Guideline on Conducting Patient Experience Care Surveys, there are five areas of interest to your studies. The Guideline considers a score of 73.7% (as opposed to the US Standard of 80) as average and the expectation is that the average results of the survey be in the following ranges:  

• >80% (green) 

• 60-79% (amber) 

• <50- 59% (red) 
  

The seven sections the survey covers are as follows:  

• Demographic Data:  No minimum score is required. This section deals with the patients' demographic data which can help assist in other studies.  

• Access to health services:  This section aims to understand the level of care required by a patient and the services they would need access to when visiting a healthcare facility.  
  Minimum Required Score: 100%
  

• Access and quality of medicines: This section aims to understand the availability of medication required to treat a patient.  
  Minimum Required Score: 95% 
  

• Safety: This section tries to uncover any risks the patient may have needed to overcome, if they got the relevant assistance they needed when they actually needed it.  
  Minimum Required Score: 65%
  

• Cleanliness and infection prevention and control: This section gauges whether or not the facility is clean, and sanitary and helps prevent the spread of disease and or infection. This section includes sanitary needs, disposal, linens, cleaning and maintenance of the facility.  
  Minimum Required Score: 74%
  

• Values and Attitudes: This section measures the degree to which patients are treated as human beings (empathy, compassion, consideration and respect). 
  Minimum Required Score: 74% standard set by Operation Phakisa Health of 2014. 

• Waiting times: This section determines waiting times. Have you informed your patients of the wait time, how long did they wait and was their waiting time excessive?  
  Minimum Required Score: 74% Phakisa Health in 2014 

The full survey includes over 70 binary (yes or no) questions including space for verbatim from the patient but can be completed within 10 minutes according to the Guide.

For your survey results to be valid, the Guide recommends that your sample size be at least 10% of all eligible patients as well as 5% complete your surveys.  The additional 5% is to account for patient who terminated interviews or abandoned the questionnaire for various reasons.  

Acting on Feedback:

It’s not enough that you measure these metrics, you should be making use of a trackable system to improve your service delivery. Any score under the target value (%) should be viewed as negative and needs to be addressed.  

We've put together a simple template for you to use in your improvement planning. Click here to download. 

It’s important to note that it is the responsibility of the hospital to ensure that this survey is available to respondents in all official languages, and that should a patient struggle with a survey, a representative is available to assist without placing undue pressure or intimidation onto the patient to respond positively.

The results of your surveys are monitored and collected not only by insurers, but also the provincial annual performance indicators and national data sets. Healthcare facilities who have embraced a patient-first approach may want to look at doing more frequent surveys as part of their overall marketing strategy.

Smoke Customer Intelligence have been partnering with some of the largest healthcare providers in South Africa to deliver timeous and convenient surveys for their healthcare facilities and staff.

We make use of omnichannel distribution such as text, email and QR codes to help reach your patients in the manner most convenient for them. Further, we offer our clients analytics and insights that can help them steer their metrics into more positive outcomes.

If you’d like to learn more or are ready to set up your own patient experience surveys, contact us today.