5 Tactics to Help Improve Your Home Health CAHPS Rating
There’s a reason that positive customer reviews are very important to home health agencies—many households seeking in-home health care services rely on published accounts to guide them in selecting the agency they feel will be the best fit for their situation.
In 2003, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid established CAHPS surveys for home health agencies. Through consistency of questions and evaluation processes, CAHPS surveys are designed to level the playing field among service providers by offering consistent and unbiased evaluations of services, gathered from clients, to allow consumers to make informed choices in health care.
The HomeHealthCAHPS.org website is widely available online and is becoming an increasingly popular rating tool for home health agency selection, making achieving positive reviews and a high score on the surveys important to most agencies!
If you’re looking to increase your CAHPS rating, there are a number of tactics you can try. We’ve compiled our Top 5 of the most effective tactics that may help you to improve your overall survey scores.
1. Outreach to your clients.
It may seem like you’re already doing this on a regular basis through the home health professional who visits your client’s home, but an extra touchpoint from other areas of the organization can go a long way in helping to create a meaningful, positive client experience.
In the same way a restaurant manager may visit your table during a meal to assure a pleasant dining experience, agency management may want to consider outreach to current clients to assure general satisfaction with services being administered.
Of course, following up quickly on complaints before they have the chance to turn into negative reviews is crucial. Fast response to issues can result in positive customer experiences.
In addition, regular mini-surveys delivered by telephone, email or even leave-behind forms can be conducted among patients and families on a regular basis to identify problem areas in your services and implement corrective actions, which could help to improve survey responses through greater customer satisfaction.
2. Work with a survey vendor that maintains a high survey response rate.
For many small and medium-sized agencies, a low number of survey respondents means that one or two negative responses can more dramatically sway your overall score. And, for smaller agencies, falling below the minimum 40 qualified responses negates your star rating for the quarter.
It’s important that your survey can elicit higher-than-average survey responses among potential respondents. Although there isn’t much flexibility in how the survey can be distributed, the results of a bi-annual CMS inspection revealed that Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging enjoys a CAHPS survey response rate that’s 16 percent higher than the average national response rate of other mail-only vendors.
3. Review the patient write-in responses on the surveys.
Many people choose to provide written feedback to the open-ended question at the end of the survey. This can be motivated by a very negative experience or a very positive one. It’s extremely important that the appropriate personnel within your agency review the written comments on each report, and introduce a proper method of dealing with problems as they are brought to light. Assure that your survey vendor provides verbatim accounts of patient and family feedback in their reports.
4. Review the report with your nursing administration and all in-home staff.
These surveys provide excellent insight into the experiences you are providing your clients.
Some of the most successful agencies hold company-wide meetings with nursing staff to review and discuss the survey reports each quarter. Negative comments and ratings are taken seriously, and changes in processes and procedures are put into place as needed to amend the situation.
5. Make sure you’re getting the comparative data you need.
It’s important for home health agencies to understand not only your own survey ratings, but also where your agency falls within national and regional rankings.
This is especially important because star ratings are dependent upon the performance of other agencies. With a mere percentage point having the power to determine one star cluster ranking over another, it’s important to identify your actual performance ranking as it relates to other agencies to understand the actual proximity of your scores.
Your Home Health CAHPS survey scores are a reflection of patient satisfaction with certain aspects of your services. Improving your ratings may make a difference in the amount of business that could be directed to your agency as customers search for reviews.