The National Committee for Quality Assurance requests public comments on a new standardized patient experience survey, the Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems (CAHPS) for the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH). Once the survey is finalized, NCQA will offer an additional, optional recognition to physician practices who report results from their patients responding to the CAHPS-PCHM Survey. Public comments are due on June 17, 2011 and must be submitted through the NCQA website.
The CAPHS-PCMH Survey asks patients about their experiences with their primary care providers during the past 12 months in the following domains:
- Access
- Information
- Communication
- Coordination of Care
- Comprehensiveness
- Self Management Support
- Shared Decision Making
The survey includes all of the core items in the current CAHPS Clinician & Group Survey, with additional items highlighting the information sharing, coordination of care, self management support and shared decision making elements of the Patient-Centered Medical Home. The CAHPS-PCMH Survey is currently only available in English but is being translated and will be available in Spanish by the fall of 2011.
Practices can earn this additional recognition beginning in spring 2012 for collecting data from their patients using the CAHPS-PCMH Survey and reporting the results to NCQA. Because there are no national data sources for benchmarking performance on patient-experience results using this new survey, results will not initially be publicly reported or used to score practices. However, it is NCQA’s intention to develop a mechanism for scoring and reporting results as soon as enough information is available for benchmarking.
Practices may also receive credit within the PCMH 2011 recognition program for using the CAHPS-PCMH Survey, but are not required to use the CAHPS-PCMH Survey or specific sampling or data collection procedures to receive PCMH 2011 recognition.
The draft adult and child CAHPS-PCMH Survey questionnaires are available for review and comment:
Ignatius Bau 