Question

HCAHPS Scores and the Patient Experience: HCAHPS is both a financial and patient experience issue. As your text discusses, it also represents a marketing challenge. For your initial post, discuss your take on the advantages and disadvantages of the HCAHPA survey in 250 words or more.

Answer 1

HCAHPS is a patient related satisfaction survey which is requires by CMS across all the hospitals in USA.

The advantages are as follows:

1) Voice of Customer: It acts as the voice of the customer and provides perception into the customer’s satisfaction index. It helps hospitals understand the level at which the patients are satisfied with care that was provided to them.

2) Public information: Survey results are public information and disseminated into public domain. It helps build hospitals on the reputation and brand awareness.

3) Payment reimbursement: If the survey results are excellent and helps government in maintaining governance in metrics, they get rewarded with financial aid and in turn keeps various hospitals who participated in the survey strong financially.

The disadvantages are as follows:

1) It could lead to unnecessary catering of patient’s whims & fancies which might not be the case with his health and that wish might affect his health. However with such survey it puts undue pressure on the hospitals to cater to such unwarranted wishes from the patients in order to score good on survey.

2) Honesty: With such surveys kicking in, it might hamper physicians, surgeons & doctors ability to provide honest update to the patients regarding their health. It has been established that upon hearing bad results patients tend to give bad ratings.

3) Costs & Satisfaction: It has empirically been established that healthcare satisfaction leads to rise in costs of healthcare in 2012.

4) Manipulation: Hospitals tends to maneuver and misquote customers responses in order to avoid bad ratings.