Making Patient Experience Meaningful
What have Aligning Forces Alliances learned about ambulatory patient experience of care? Since its inception, the AF4Q program has explicitly called for the inclusion of measures of patient experience with ambulatory care alongside measures of clinical quality and safety. Across the United States health care system, there is a growing emphasis on delivering patient-centered care. The best and often only way to determine how providers are performing on this key quality metric is to survey patients. Patient experience surveys, particularly those that use validated questions such as the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Clinician & Group Surveys (CG-CAHPS®), a widely accepted tool for measuring patient experience with ambulatory care, give providers feedback on patients’ office visits. Practices can then take specific steps to improve the care experience. The 16 AF4Q Alliances have learned much about implementing, using, and displaying CG-CAHPS patient experience surveys.
Resources
This brief discusses the growing number of forces at the national and regional levels which are driving the “value proposition” for implementing the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Clinician & Group Survey.
This brief outlines two major strategies for Alliances to implement and finance a standardized approach to measuring ambulatory patient experience using the CG-CAHPS Survey.
This brief provides guidance on how to take advantage of existing but separate patient surveying efforts in a community to produce a community-level public report, called the “leveraged approach.”
This decision guide will help users make key decisions in developing a patient experience survey.
This brief presents an account of how three practices in different parts of the country have achieved improvements in patient experience in different domains.
This inventory lists a variety of free resources—including toolkits, guides, reports, and webcasts—that are available to support health care organizations in determining what they need to do to improve patient experience and how to implement those improvements.