As if they don’t have enough to worry about with low operating margins, calls for reduced costs and ever-decreasing reimbursements for care, hospitals and healthcare providers are now obsessed with how much customers like them.
As part of the Affordable Care Act, hospitals are now required to measure up to a certain degree on how well they satisfy their customers, their patients, according to a story by Jordan Rau at nytimes.com.
If hospitals don’t rate highly enough, they will be penalized by Medicare and Medicaid, Rau writes. It’s one thing if you live in the polite South or easy-going Midwest, the story says, but hospitals located in the picky, prickly Northeast and West Coast are crossing their fingers.
”Medicare will start taking patient satisfaction into account when reimbursing hospitals,” Rau writes. “Disgruntled patients will mean reduced revenue, a frightening prospect for hospitals already facing empty beds because of the recession and pressure from insurers to hold down costs.”
According to Rau, the Affordable Care Act now pits hospitals against one another in a competition to see who makes their patients the happiest. “Those with the best scores will receive more money,” he writes.
“Hospitals are going be punished financially by the federal government for things they can’t control,” Dr. James Merlino, chief experience officer at the Cleveland Clinic, told Rau.
Dr. Katherine Hochman had the same concern. Hochman, an NYU physician, told Rau, “People in New York have very high expectations about what it means to be taken care of. When they don’t get their food on time and have to spend eight hours in the emergency department, well, that’s just not their image of what a world-class institution is.”
The hospital’s ratings come from a Medicaid-approved survey of patients who rank their stays “on a 10-point scale, and Medicare will credit only hospitals that receive a 9 or 10,” Rau writes.
The survey, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), bills itself as “the first national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patients' perspectives of hospital care.”
According to the Web site, the survey is “designed to produce data about patients' perspectives of care that allow objective and meaningful comparisons of hospitals on topics that are important to consumers.” It also is intended to set up new incentives for hospitals to improve quality of care, and to “enhance accountability in health care by increasing transparency of the quality of hospital care provided in return for the public investment.”
A big concern is that the ratings system may hurt hospitals that handle many complex cases, Rau writes. Some research shows the longer a patient remains in the hospital, the less the patient thinks of the care and attention he’s getting. Consequently, the hospital gets a lower rating, according to Rau.
Deborah DiSesa Hirsch is an award-winning health and technology writer who has worked for newspapers, magazines and IBM in her 20-year career. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Rich Steeves
