CAHPS® is an easy-to-use kit of survey and report tools that provides reliable and valid information to help consumers and purchasers assess and choose among health plans. As the recognized standard for obtaining consumers' assessment of their health plans, CAHPS® is used widely throughout the United States. In addition to describing CAHPS® and its users, this fact sheet summarizes new projects under development.
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CAHPS® Development
CAHPS®
Users
Future Users
CAHPS®
Survey and Reporting Kit 2002
National CAHPS®
Benchmarking Database
Survey Users Network
(SUN)
What's New
For
More Information
Today's complex and competitive health care environment has generated unprecedented demand for tools and information to document health care quality. The consumer's perspective has become an essential aspect of measuring health care quality, and CAHPS® is recognized as the industry standard for obtaining consumers' assessment of their health plans.
CAHPS® (formerly the Consumer Assessment of Health Plans) has expanded to other health care settings such as medical groups and behavioral health services, and to specific populations such as children with chronic conditions.
In October 1995, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) began a new initiative that involved building an integrated set of carefully tested and standardized questionnaires and reporting formats that could be used to collect and report meaningful and reliable information about the experiences of consumers enrolled in health plans. The Agency awarded 5-year grants to consortia headed by the Harvard Medical School, Research Triangle Institute, and RAND. AHRQ also awarded a contract to Westat to provide technical assistance. These three organizations, along with AHRQ and Westat, formed teams to focus on questionnaire development, reporting product development, and evaluation.
In June 2002, AHRQ funded three 5-year cooperative agreements with the American Institutes for Research, Harvard Medical School, and RAND to continue the research and development of CAHPS® along with AHRQ and Westat.
Research and development will focus on CAHPS® reporting as well as continuing to expand CAHPS® beyond health plans to the individual provider level.
CAHPS® products are designed to be flexible to meet a variety of needs and satisfy many different users. Sponsors and other users are typically from the following general categories:
CAHPS® data are collected on health plans in which over 120 million Americans are enrolled. Current users include:
A number of new survey instruments are in development. It is expected that hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes will conduct CAHPS® to comply with CMS and other reporting requirements. In addition, many will use CAHPS® results to guide quality improvement initiatives. Also, medical groups and individual providers of care, including doctors, nurses, and therapists will use CAHPS® results to improve the quality of care they provide to patients.
The CAHPS® Survey and Reporting Kit 2002 provides reliable and valid tools that sponsors can use to help consumers and purchasers assess and select health plans and services. The kit contains:
The latest version of the kit is now a Web-only product, available through the Survey Users Network (SUN) Web site. It contains the 3.0 version of the Health Plan Survey that can be downloaded and no longer will be available in print form. Previous versions of the kit do not support the new survey instruments. Providing the kit through the Web ensures that users have access to the most up-to-date version. In addition, users who need additional copies of surveys or information can download just what they need rather than ordering a complete kit. (CD-ROM versions of the kit will be made on request for users who have problems with the download.) To download the kit, go to www.cahps-sun.org.
The kit contains the following survey questionnaires:
Many of these questionnaires are also available in several languages, including Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Korean, and Khmer (Cambodian).
CAHPS® reporting templates currently are available in two forms:
The NCBD facilitates comparisons of CAHPS® results among different sponsors, including Medicaid agencies, public and private employers, and individual health plans. The NCBD currently contains 5 years of data from CAHPS. The 2002 database holds survey results for over 360,000 adults and children enrolled in commercial, Medicaid, SCHIP, and Medicare plans.
Benefits of participating in the NCBD include:
The NCBD is the only source of CAHPS® information for all types of care including commercial, Medicaid, and Medicare.
The NCBD is also an important supplier of primary data for conducting research on survey design and health plan and enrollee characteristics that influence performance. With specific authorization, sponsors and researchers may also access other sponsor-specific data files or aggregate or specialized subsets of the NCBD data files. Researchers can access the NCBD database without charge upon review of the proposed project.
SUN is a technical assistance and information sharing network that is coordinated and managed by Westat as part of its role as the CAHPS® technical assistance contractor.
Free of charge, SUN provides:
Additionally, online conferences and workshops on CAHPS® topics important to users are held throughout the year. A user's group meeting is also held regularly.
The CAHPS® Consortium will focus on several new projects during the next 5-year research and development phase.
Hospital CAHPS®. Currently, a standardized consumer assessment instrument for inpatient care does not exist. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) seeks to develop a standard that could be used for measuring and publicly reporting hospital patient experiences. AHRQ is leading the research and development effort to develop a hospital survey that could be adopted as a standard.
Provider CAHPS®. For several years, CAHPS® data have been available to help consumers choose health plans. However, many consumers consider the choice of a provider to be more important to their quality of care than their choice of health plan. The CAHPS® Consortium developed an instrument to measure consumer assessments of provider groups and is developing an instrument to measure consumer assessments of individual providers.
Quality improvement. While the original goal of CAHPS® was to provide information to consumers to help them make more informed health care choices, CAHPS® results are also used for quality improvement for several reasons. First, only patients can fully assess some aspects of care. Quality improvement in these areas is dependent on measuring consumer assessments. Second, the data from CAHPS® surveys can serve multiple purposes to increase the cost-benefit of administering the surveys.
Cultural comparability. CAHPS® surveys have been translated into many languages. AHRQ recognizes the need to explore new concepts being measured that may not be interpreted the same within different cultures. Both the translation of CAHPS® instruments and how the survey items are interpreted by various cultures is a focus of CAHPS® research. With our diverse population, understanding the cultural comparability of the survey instruments is essential to interpreting CAHPS® results.
For more information or to join SUN:
Call the CAHPS® Helpline at 800-492-9261.
E-mail SUN at CAHPS1@westat.com.
Visit the SUN Web site at: www.cahps-sun.org.
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CAHPS® is a registered trademark of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a U.S. Government agency. |
Current as of March 2003
AHRQ Publication No. 03-P001
Replaces AHCPR Publication No. 00-PO47
Internet Citation:
CAHPS® and the National CAHPS® Benchmarking Database: Fact Sheet. AHRQ Publication No. 03-P001, March 2003. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/cahpfact.htm
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