Presented by:
Nicole Caruso
Consultant and Focus Group Moderator

Focus group research provides your organization with the opportunity to delve deep into the thoughts and behaviors of patients. A clear understanding of the complexity and nuances in the perspectives of patients can mean the difference between HCAHPS performance that's almost on target and performance that exceeds expectations. In this webinar, Nicole Caruso will explore:

• When to conduct qualitative research
• How to decide who to invite to the focus groups
• The steps needed for execution
• How to understand the insights provided during the focus groups
• How to use the focus group findings to “move the needle”

Ms. Nicole Caruso has 14 years of dedicated experience in healthcare consulting, with 11 years of expert focus group moderation.

Date: Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Time: 2:00-3:00 ET
Forum: Online webinar
Cost: $99 per log-in - the number of participants per log-in is unlimited. Clients save $50 and pay only $49! Email us at researchinfo@healthstream.com for the special client invitation code.

Registration Required. Click the link below to register online. Payment is required at the time of registration via credit card. Instructions on accessing the webinar will be provided with your registration confirmation.

Register Online

Mark your calendars! HealthStream Research’s 2008 Summit will be at the Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee, September 2-5, 2008.

Our Summit registration is now open and we encourage you to register sooner rather than later. We are excited about Summit 2008; several features make it particularly unique and important to attend.

First is the focus of the conference: Creating Excellence in Healthcare. From our expanded roster of keynote speakers, customer presentations, and breakout sessions to networking and product input sessions, the entire conference is focused on one thing: how you can help to create excellence in healthcare. When you attend this year’s Summit, you will hear from the leading innovators and walk away with ideas and action plans of your own.

Second is the expanded nature of the conference. For the first time, HealthStream is combining its Research and Learning conferences. This means that you will have the option of gathering an entirely new library of resources to support you and your organization in creating excellence in healthcare.

Third is the unique networking opportunity at the conference. No other conference provides such immediate access to thought leadership across critical healthcare topics, in-depth training and support, and high-impact networking and brainstorming opportunities. You are part of a powerful community that is, collectively, improving the quality of healthcare—and you’ll have opportunity to collaborate at Summit 2008.

We currently have opened “early bird” registration, which entitles you to a $100 immediate discount off of the regular registration fee of $499 if you register before May 31, 2008.

Register Here

Public Reporting Has Begun!

Public reporting of HCAHPS results has begun on the Hospital Compare website (http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov). For public reporting purposes, the six composite scores, the two individual items and the two global items are displayed. There are both national and state comparisons for each of the reported results. In addition, the number of surveys completed (in three broad categories) and the survey response rate are also reported for each participating hospital. THIS DATA ONLY REFLECTS OCTOBER 06 – JUNE 07 DISCHARGES FOR HOSPITALS THAT ELECTED TO BEGIN PARTICIPATION IN OCTOBER 2006.

HCAHPS Update

When patients give a low rating for a particular question, hospitals usually want to know why. In the past, before the advent of HCAHPS and public reporting, hospitals could add follow-up questions when patients gave low scores on key questions and ask for the reasons behind the low rating. Unfortunately, CMS does not allow the addition of questions that ask respondents to explain ratings for specific questions. CMS states that including a question to explain a low rating would be seen by everyone that takes the survey, and this could dramatically influence scores.

However, CMS allows general open-ended questions to be asked of a targeted population, such as those who give low scores to a specific item. With phone surveys, HealthStream Research can utilize a combination of skip patterns and targeted general open-ended questions. As a paper survey cannot be programmed, all respondents would see all questions, with no way to give follow-up questions seen only by those that give low ratings. Simply seeing a question on the page asking to explain a low rating could bias the respondents into thinking that the hospital has a problem in a certain area, and thus could influence them to give a lower rating to associated questions.

For example, let’s say that a patient gives a low rating to pain management. While CMS does not allow you to ask why a low rating was given, you can ask a general open-ended question such as, “Is there anything the hospital could do to improve pain management?” Skip patterns allow HealthStream Research to provide the follow-up question only to the specific respondents who gave a low rating, while those that gave a high rating would not be asked the follow-up question.

In short, HealthStream Research’s phone surveys allow you to easily explore what is driving low scores on key HCAHPS items, while mail surveys are severely handicapped in providing this level of exploration. If you would like to know more about the benefits of adding targeted follow-up questions to your survey, contact your Project Manager.

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.

Full Article

In a previous issue of Random Samples, HealthStream Research released a Discovery Paper entitled, “Do You Need Both to Succeed? How the HCAHPS Survey Compares to Satisfaction Surveys.” This paper showed that HCAHPS and patient satisfaction surveys obtain data that are highly related and give hospitals the data they need to make quality improvements. Based on these studies that showed significant consistency between the results of both survey types, HealthStream Research recommends using an HCAHPS-based survey for all patient research, with no need to conduct a separate traditional satisfaction survey. This article will address how both research and logic support this position.

Full Article

Question:
Are employee benchmarks outside of healthcare useful for hospitals?

Answer:
As fully described in the White Paper The Importance of Using Healthcare-Specific Benchmarks for Employee Surveys in Healthcare Organizations, the healthcare industry is qualitatively different from other industries—and these differences have a profound impact on employees’ attitudes, perceptions, satisfaction levels, and organizational engagement. There are fundamental, structural, inherent differences among healthcare employees relative to other industries. The significance of this fact cannot be overstated if one seeks to compare employees across organizations. Therefore, it is crucially important for employee satisfaction measures in healthcare organizations to be benchmarked exclusively within the healthcare industry to produce meaningful, actionable insights. This is one of many reasons why HealthStream Research is dedicated to the healthcare industry.

As Mollie Elizabeth Condra, Ph.D., HealthStream Senior Director of Communications, Research & Investor Relations, writes in the White Paper, benchmarking and the adoption of best practices from outside the healthcare industry can be fraught with complexities for workforce development. To accurately and meaningfully understand how one’s workforce rates along the full spectrum of important satisfaction measures, it is imperative that healthcare organizations be compared to other healthcare organizations (i.e., “apples to apples” comparisons). The unique environmental factors and characteristics inherent in healthcare jobs are all important in understanding and interpreting employee surveys. For example, the stress that comes with occasional bouts of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror where life or death decisions are made is common in healthcare organizations, but extremely unlikely in most other industries. The ability to manage, cope, and work effectively under this type of stress is a crucial skill for healthcare professionals that affects their performance and well-being. This, in turn, affects their employee satisfaction scores.

It’s easy to see, then, that rating the nature of stress between a healthcare professional and an employee outside of healthcare is like comparing "apples to oranges." It’s not meaningful. Moreover, healthcare employees tend to remain in the healthcare industry to a far greater extent than other industries’ employees remain in their industry. This means that the fundamental, structural qualities that characterize the healthcare workforce—and differentiate it from other industries’ workforces—are relatively the same across healthcare organizations. This fact reinforces the validity of benchmarking healthcare organization employee satisfaction measures exclusively among other healthcare organizations.


Do you have a question you’d like to send to our team of experts? Send an email to researchinfo@healthstream.com, and our interdisciplinary team of experts will provide you with a detailed answer. Specify if you wish to remain anonymous.