The HCAHPS Handbook: Hardwire Your Hospital for Pay-For-Performance Success

Pay For Performance is Here. Is Your Hospital Ready To Compete in a Market That Keeps Getting Tougher and Tougher?

Hospitals have always felt pressure to provide excellent clinical care. And now that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been signed into law, that pressure has intensified. Increasingly, hospitals will face financial consequences for failing to live up to patient expectations of quality care.

HCAHPS results are directly linked to reimbursement. But they're also a barometer for measuring clinical performance and quality improvement. When hospitals raise their HCAHPS results, they also have fewer falls, lower infection rates, fewer readmissions - all the factors that impact reimbursement.

The HCAHPS Handbook is a practical resource filled with actionable tips proven to help hospitals improve patient perception of care. Because it's broken down by HCAHPS composites, readers can zero in on the parts of the survey that need attention. And the book provides a few carefully targeted tactics they can use to improve the results on each question.

Best of all, these tactics are foundational. They build on what most hospitals (particularly those that have implemented Studer Group's Evidence Based Leadership framework) are already doing. It's about working smarter, not harder. And ultimately, it's about hardwiring the behaviors and processes that lead to consistent excellence - and creating a culture of always.

The HCAHPS Handbook is a collaborative effort by three Studer Group leaders and HCAHPS experts.

Quint Studer, founder and CEO, spends much of his time creating, harvesting, and sharing best practices from his company's national learning lab of hundreds of organizations. Inc. magazine named Studer its Master of Business, making him the only healthcare leader to have ever won this award.

Brian C. Robinson, executive vice-president, is Studer Group's advisor on health policy and industry affairs. He has often been called upon for his expertise in Washington, D.C., where he has been appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to serve as a technical advisor to CMS.

Karen Cook, RN, is a senior coach. She was the primary author of one of the industry's first HCAHPS toolkits. This resource, published by Studer Group in2007, became a springboard for The HCAHPS Handbook.