Fast Facts
- Transparency about health care leads to higher patient satisfaction and increased trust. In turn, increased trust leads to increased compliance with discharge instructions and follow-up care — which leads to better patient outcomes.
- Holding team members accountable ensures continuous improvement, and a culture of accountability increases staff satisfaction.
- Patient experience improvement is a vital part of any organization that is serious about offering superior service.
What It Means
Patient satisfaction and patient experience are both important, but they are two different measurements at Central Maine Healthcare. Patient satisfaction focuses on whether a patient’s expectations about a health encounter were met. Patient experience seeks to understand from patients whether something that should happen in a healthcare setting actually happened — the range of interactions patients have across the continuum of the healthcare system, including care from providers, nurses, specialists and everyone else who works in our facilities.
At CMH, we select a random assortment of patients to complete Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) surveys to help us gauge their experiences at CMH. The 32-item survey allows patients to rate everything from the temperature of their hospital room and the quality of their food to their communication with nurses and the amount of time providers spent with them.
How Are We Doing?
Data from our HCAHPS survey is submitted to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency within the United States Department of Health and Human Services that administers the Medicare and Medicaid program. The survey data account for 25% of CMS’s formula for calculating value-based payment to hospitals. You can compare our results here: