Do You Need Both to Succeed? 
How the HCAHPS Survey Compares to Satisfaction Surveys

With the advent of HCAHPS, hospitals are now questioning the need to continue fielding their traditional patient satisfaction surveys.  Do they really need to do both?  Hospitals that consider discontinuing their traditional patient surveys are often concerned about two issues: "Is HCAHPS a useful survey tool?" and "Is my performance going to change?"  In short, does HCAHPS capture the same drivers of the patient experience as previous traditional patient surveys?  HealthStream Research has analyzed the data and our research suggests that HCAHPS and patient satisfaction surveys obtain data that are highly related and give hospitals the data they need to make quality improvements.  [More]

HCAHPS: Importance of Staff Responsiveness and Demographic Analysis 

HCAHPS is the first publicly available standardized survey designed to gather information from adult inpatients about their experiences with hospital care and services.  This survey was developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in partnership with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).  The HCAHPS survey has been designed to support public reporting on hospital performance by generating data that can be compared reliably across hospitals and to provide a uniform set of core patient survey measures that can complement other existing hospital survey tools designed to support quality improvement. [More]

HCAHPS: Physicians and Nurses—Listening to Patients 

HealthStream Research continues to examine the expanding Patient Insights–Inpatient Satisfaction Research database for emerging HCAHPS trends.  It has already been established that nurses' listening performance is the item with the highest-correlation to the overall rating on the HCAHPS survey.  Upon deeper examination, HealthStream Research's analysts saw that the rank order of the top items for physicians was identical to the rank order of the top items for nurses.  This research paper will show that patients have similar expectations of consistency across the entire patient care team and that listening skills are of the highest importance. [More]

HCAHPS: Importance of Staff Responsiveness and Demographic Analysis 

HCAHPS is the first publicly available standardized survey designed to gather information from adult inpatients about their experiences with hospital care and services.  This survey was developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in partnership with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).  The HCAHPS survey has been designed to support public reporting on hospital performance by generating data that can be compared reliably across hospitals and to provide a uniform set of core patient survey measures that can complement other existing hospital survey tools designed to support quality improvement. [More]

Wait Time and Treatment Time in the Emergency Room
Effects of Patient Perception on Overall Quality Ratings

Does the length of time a patient waits for initial assessment, wait time after initial assessment, and treatment time relate to Emergency Department patient ratings of overall quality?  HealthStream Research investigated these questions with a large sample of emergency room patients.  The HealthStream Research Patient Insights Survey was administered to 12,502 emergency department patients from across the nation.  [More]

Inpatient Perception of Quality: Comparison of Admissions Through Emergency Department vs. the Admitting Office

In few industries is the customers' perception of quality believed to be more aligned with customer satisfaction than the healthcare industry.  Hospital administrators must cultivate positive perceptions in all areas of the hospital as a way of increasing patient loyalty.  With this in mind, HealthStream Research periodically conducts pilot studies and national database studies on our patient, physician, and employee data in order to explore the perceptions of healthcare customers.  [More]

HCAHPS Discovery:  What Drives Cleanliness Scores and How to Improve

The cleanliness of your hospital speaks volumes about your commitment to quality; in fact, cleanliness is among the top drivers of patients' overall perceptions about your hospital — for all patient surveys, not just HCAHPS.  Patients today are far more knowledgeable than in times past and are increasingly concerned with infection control and basic hygiene issues.  While patients may not be able to judge highly technical aspects of care, they do know what 'clean' looks like.  [More]


Patient and Employee Satisfaction - What Faith-Based Healthcare Organizations Have to Teach Us All

An in-depth analysis of HealthStream Research's national patient and employee benchmarks compared faith-based to secular healthcare organizations.  Faith-based hospitals excelled in several dimensions of patient perception of care.  Perhaps the most important issues are where and how faith-based healthcare organizations outperform their counterparts.  Many healthcare organizations — regardless of type — can learn from studying the success of many faith-based hospitals.  [More]

How the Length of Stay for Inpatients Affects Satisfaction, and What You Can do to Improve

Over the past three years, HealthStream Research has conducted surveys with more than one million inpatients at hospitals across the United States, and our expert analysts and consultants stay hard at work to find major discoveries from our robust national database.  The data shows that inpatient satisfaction begins to decrease on the third day of inpatient care and continues to decline thereafter.  This Discovery Paper will show not only precisely when the drops in satisfaction occur but also how you can combat this decline.  [More]


How Nurses Drive the Top Performance Measures for Inpatient Satisfaction, and How to Improve

Over the past three years, HealthStream Research has conducted surveys with more than a million inpatients at hospitals across the United States.  In these surveys, inpatients were asked a subset of 60 questions relating to the quality of care provided by the hospitals.  HealthStream Research has not only identified the top performance measures associated with overall patient satisfaction, but also shows the details of hospitals' performance for each attribute.  Not suprisingly, each of the top three attributes shown to drive patient satisfaction scores is driven by your nursing staff. [More]

Improving Patient Satisfaction with Better Discharge Instructions

Discharge instructions play an incredibly vital role in the successful recovery of patients—something healthcare providers know intuitively; you want the patient to achieve certain health objectives, and you know it's your job to coach them to success.  But if you leave discharge instructions to chance or omit certain key steps, not only will the patient be less likely to recover, but HealthStream Research's studies have shown that discharge instructions are highly correlated to Overall Patient Satisfaction.  Send them out the door unprepared, and all the work you put in before discharge will be heavily compromised.  [More]

Patient Satisfaction by Insurance Provider

HealthStream Research has discovered through studies with more than one million hospital patients that satisfaction can differ greatly by insurance type and visit.  It is clear that patients differentiate their level of satisfaction based on many factors. However, in many cases the most dramatic of these is in the areas relating to insurance coverage and the type of treatment the patient is receiving. [More]

Projecting Patient Satisfaction to Financial Performance

With increasing consumerism in the healthcare market, patient satisfaction is no longer an end in of itself, but more so a means to an end—business outcomes.  Conventional wisdom states that improving patient satisfaction is good business for at least two reasons: [More]

HealthStream Research conducts patient satisfaction surveys for hundreds of hospitals in the U.S. and has a database of more than a million patient experiences.  From these communications with hospital patients, we have seen instances where patient indicate dissatisfaction with the bills they have received (because bills often confuse and frustrate former patients).  The question was posed as to how, if at all, the hospital bill affects patient satisfaction for inpatients, outpatients and emergency patients. [More]

Focus on Top Five Predictors of Outpatient Satisfaction to Build Patient Loyalty

When conducting satisfaction research, hospitals will identify many areas where they have the opportunity to improve satisfaction scores.  But by focusing on the service factors that have the greatest impact on satisfaction, you not only begin to more significantly impact scores, but to develop loyal customers.  Developing and maintaining loyal customers will have a significant impact on your bottom line. [More]

Impact of the HIPAA Privacy Rule on Inpatient Satisfaction Ratings

The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA, govern standards for protecting the privacy of medical records and individually identifiable health information.  The rule was enacted to increase the privacy protection of health information identifying individuals who are living or deceased, and to regulate known and unanticipated risks to privacy that may accompany the use and disclosure of personal health information.  [More]

Drivers of Inpatient Satisfaction: Academic Medical Centers versus Community Hospitals

As the healthcare environment becomes more and more competitive, customer satisfaction and loyalty is becoming a more critical component of a successful and thriving organization. To maintain and grow market share, your hospital must measure the perceptions and opinions of recent inpatients, outpatients, emergency patients, home health patients, and physician office patients and be able to identify the elements of their encounters that created satisfaction or dissatisfaction. [More]