New H-CAHPS Scorecard and Survey of Best Practices

To JHM Hospital Presidents, Department Directors, Chief Nursing Officers, JHH Nursing Directors and Service Excellence Team Members

Dear Leader,

As you know, Johns Hopkins Medicine has committed itself to consistently delivering patient- and family-centered care. As we work to improve, we'll be using the experiences reported by our patients through the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (H-CAHPS) survey to learn from one another, and we'd like your backing for this important initiative.

To support your organization's improvement efforts and to increase the number of success stories across all of our member organizations, our service excellence colleagues have created a bundle of best practices in H-CAHPS improvement. Culled from top-performing hospitals, these include such interventions as conducting bedside shift reports to engage patients and family members, and leading daily huddles to ensure coordination of care with clinical teams and support staff.

We will ask clinical nurse managers to complete a survey by Feb. 19 for each unit they oversee to identify opportunities where these best practices can be implemented in our health system. Their responses feed into a two-part hospital scorecard that tracks H-CAHPS performance against the JHM goal of performing in the top quartile of the survey, as well as how extensively each facility has adopted these best practices. Our plan is for each of the hospital presidents to present their new scorecard, which will be available by the end of the month, at the next JHM Patient Safety and Quality Board meeting on Tuesday, March 4.

We ask that you:

• Take a moment to review the attached list of H-CAHPS Improvement Best Practices.
• Encourage your nurse managers to complete the survey by the Feb. 19 deadline.
• Review the completed H-CAHPS scorecard (when available) prior to the meeting on March 4.

As always, thank you for your commitment to improving the experiences of our patients and their loved ones.

Sincerely,

William Baumgartner
Vice Dean for Clinical Affairs, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Senior Vice President for the Office of Johns Hopkins Physicians

Gene E. Green
President, Suburban Hospital 

Judy A. Reitz
Vice President for Quality Improvement, Johns Hopkins Medicine
Vice President of Operations Integration, Johns Hopkins Health System
Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, The Johns Hopkins Hospital

Peter J. Pronovost
Director, Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality
Senior Vice President for Patient Safety and Quality, Johns Hopkins Medicine

Attachments

• HCAHPS Improvement Best Practices
• HCAHPS Improvement Best Practice Fundamentals