The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) is a patient-satisfaction survey that the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) says is the first national, standardized and publicly reported survey of patients’ perspectives of hospital care. Pronounced “H-caps,” the survey also is known as the CAHPS hospital survey.
For many years, hospitals have collected information on patient satisfaction for their own internal use. But HCAHPS is now a national standard for collecting and publicly reporting information about patient experience of care, allowing consumers and journalists to compare hospitals against each other. For CMS, the HCAHPS survey is one of several components the agency uses when assessing how much to pay each hospital under Medicare’s hospital value-based purchasing program. The survey has 32 questions, addressing 21 aspects of patients’ perspectives of care including communication with doctors and nurses, responsiveness of hospital staff, pain management and care transitions.