The HCAHPS survey is administered to adult patients across medical conditions between 48 hours and six weeks after discharge the survey is not restricted to Medicare beneficiaries.

While many hospitals have collected information on patient satisfaction for their own internal use, until HCAHPS there was no national standard for collecting and publicly reporting information about patient experience of care that allowed valid comparisons to be made across hospitals locally, regionally and nationally. HCAHPS (pronounced 'H-caps'), also known as the CAHPS® Hospital Survey, is a survey instrument and data collection methodology for measuring patients' perceptions of their hospital experience. The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey is the first national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patients' perspectives of hospital care. Examples of HACs are objects accidentally left in the body after surgery, severe pressure sores and vascular catheter-associated infections. If hospitals follow evidenced based guidelines to treat and care for patients, these conditions are less likely to occur. Hospital-acquired conditions (HACs) are published as rates and are serious conditions that patients may get during an inpatient hospital stay. Examples are the percentage of patients receiving smoking cessation information at discharge if the patient was admitted with an acute myocardial infarction (heart attack). Process measures show, in percentage form or as a rate, how often a health-care provider gives recommended care that is the treatment know to give the best results for most patients with a particular condition. Examples of outcome measures are death rates within 30 days of discharge and rates of readmissions 30 days following hospital discharge. Outcome measures tell what happened after patients with certain conditions received hospital care. This information is collected on Medicare patients only submitted to CMS by each hospital. Three types of quality information is available: outcome measures, process measures and rates of hospital acquired conditions. However, the patient satisfaction survey is collected from a random sample of all discharged adult patients. This quality and patient satisfaction data is required for all hospitals that treat Medicare patients. On this site ( ) CMS publishes hospital performance data collected about indicators of quality, a national patient satisfaction survey, as well as payment and volume information for each hospital. Hospital Compare is a federal website operated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS).

Medicare hospital compare quality