Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS)

REPLIES 1

I have chosen the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) as an example of applying statistics in the real world, specifically in patients’ satisfaction during hospitalization. Per Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), HCAHPS is defined as a survey instrument utilizing collected data to measure patients’ satisfaction under different categories such as,

Did providers (doctors and nurses) treat you courteously and respectfully?
Did providers listen carefully to you?
Did providers explain things in a language you can easily understand?
How often was your room and bathroom cleaned?
Did providers explain new medications to you?
HCAHPS survey utilizes a random sample of recently discharged patients (48 hours and six weeks after discharge) by asking twenty-nine questions regarding their recent hospitalization. Patients who are ineligible for this survey are those under eighteen, patients admitted with behavioral health issues and hospice patients. Each hospital will then get a score according to the patient’s responses. Depending on their score, a hospital can get monetary rewards through the Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program. Per CMS, VBP provides acute care hospitals with incentive payments for patient care quality.

HCAHPS survey is an example of random sampling (recently discharged patients) with variables under numerical (48 hours and six weeks after discharge) and categorical (29 questions). This survey also displays a positive correlation between high scores and monetary rewards

REPLIES 2

Statistics in the real world are essential in the healthcare field. Real-world data collected during daily healthcare practices are increasingly used in medical research to assess questions that cannot be addressed in the context of a randomized controlled trial (Mental, Ali, 2023). Studies where the researchers assign treatments to cases are called experiments. When this assignment includes randomization, e.g. using a coin flip to decide which treatment a patient receives, it is called a randomized experiment. Randomized experiments are fundamentally important when trying to show a causal connection between two variables (Diez, 2019). These experiments are necessary in healthcare for researchers to evaluate the effectiveness in treatments. Statistics gives researchers a better understanding of how and what treatments are working for specific diseases and medications.