The Road to HCAHPS Implementation

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) has already made great strides toward the public reporting of HCAHPS results. Here's a timeline of major milestones to date-and a look at what lies ahead.

• First Public Report of HCAHPS:  March 28, 2008. Public reporting of HCAHPS performance on Hospital Compare website begins.
• Hospitals Participating in Voluntary National Implementation Receive a Preview Report of Data:  January 17, 2008
• Dry Run: December 2007. New hospitals that have not yet participated in a Dry Run may do so in December 2007.
  
• CMS Finalizes the HCAHPS Reporting Format for Public Reporting: Anticipated Fall 2007
• October 2007. New hospitals that had not yet participated in a dry run of HCAHPS could take part in the September dry run. Participating hospitals will begin submitting data for National Implementation with discharges. September 2007 dry run participants will not qualify as meeting requirements for the Fiscal Year 2008 annual payment update. Participants must contract with an approved survey vendor, as they will not be able to satisfy HCAHPS training requirements to self-administer until 2008.
• Dry Run: September 2007

• RHQDAPU Notice of Participation Form Due: August 15, 2007. Previous Notice of Participation forms included clinical measures but not HCAHPS. For FY 2008, participating hospitals need to sign and submit to the appropriate QIO a new form, which has not yet been released. Press Ganey will alert clients and share submission instructions as soon as the form is made available.
• National Implementation Linked to Payment: July 2007 Discharges. HCAHPS data collection began for annual payment update for FY 2008.
• Dry Run: March 2007 Discharges. For those hospitals that did not participate in 2006, the second dry run allowed hospitals to test the HCAHPS survey and data submission process without publicly reporting results.
• Voluntary National Implementation: October 2006 Discharges. Data collection for voluntary national implementation of HCAHPS begins. For initial phase, nine months of data was collected.
• Dry Run: April/May/June 2006 Discharges. For this prerequisite to October national implementation, dry run data was submitted to CMS but not publicly reported.