HealthGrades' Outstanding Patient Experience Award™ recognizes hospitals for their patient satisfaction based on their patients' experiences in their hospital. HealthGrades analyzed patient satisfaction data for 3,775 hospitals in the country using HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) hospital survey data obtained from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
HealthGrades applied a scoring methodology to compare hospitals nationally, create an overall patient satisfaction score for each hospital, and determine the recipients of the 2010/2011 Outstanding Patient Experience Award.
For this standardized patient experience survey, a random sample of patients visiting a hospital was given a 27-question survey within 48 hours to six weeks after discharge. The 27 questions are rolled up to provide:
- Overall rating
- Recommendation to family/friends
- Communication with doctors
- Communication with nurses
- Responsiveness of hospital staff
- Pain management
- Communication about medicines
- Discharge information
- Cleanliness
- Quietness
To determine recipients for HealthGrades Outstanding Patient Experience Award, HealthGrades performed the following steps.
First, HealthGrades excluded hospitals that did not meet the minimum requirement of 50 acute care beds or at least 100 survey responses.
For nine of the ten measures (listed above), CMS reported percentages of patient responses associated with positive ("always"), neutral ("usually") and negative ("sometimes/never") responses. One measure, the Discharge Information question was a yes/no response.
HealthGrades standardized the percentages associated with a positive or yes response to mean zero and variance one, thereby producing ten standardized scores. Specifically, for each positive (always) response, the standardized score is calculated as:
(hospital percent – national average percent) / standard deviation.
A higher percentage is favorable.
HealthGrades standardized the percentages associated with a negative ("sometimes/never") response, thereby producing nine standardized scores. Specifically, for each negative ("sometimes/never") response, the standardized score is calculated as:
(national average percent – hospital percent ) / standard deviation.
A lower percentage is favorable.
To create a ranking score, HealthGrades took the weighted average of the 19 standardized scores. In the weighting process, the Overall rating question and the Recommendation to family/friends question each carried a weight of 25%. All other scores were weighted equally accounting for the remaining 50%.
Finally, eligible hospitals–those with a HealthGrades average star rating of 2.5 or higher–were ranked according to the ranking score, and the top 15% of these eligible hospitals were designated as Outstanding Patient Experience Award recipients.