Patient Experience Compare Data

FAQ

CAHPS Clinician & Group National & Regional Data

Source: Clinician & Group CAHPS Database Online Reporting System

• CAHPS 2018 Adult 6-Month Survey 3.0 with/without PCMH items was used to obtain Access, Overall Rating of Provider, Comprehensiveness (Stress Discussed), and Care Coordination benchmarks.
• 2018 CG-CAHPS Database includes data submitted for two survey versions (Adult 3.0 and Adult 3.0 PCMH) collected from January 2018 through June 2019 and represent patient encounters that occurred between January 1, 2018 and December 31, 2018. There are 2,024 practice sites and 313,706 respondents.
• States are categorized into U.S. Census Bureau-defined regions as follows:
  Northeast: CT, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, PR, RI, VT
  Midwest: IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, NE, ND, OH, SD, WI
  West: AK, AZ, CA, CO, GU, HI, ID, MT, NM, NV, OR, UT, WA, WY
  South: AL, AR, DC, DE, FL, GA, KY, LA, MD, MS, NC, OK, SC, TN, TX, VA, WV
• "Not Available" is displayed when there are insufficient data to show a result.

VA Patient Experience Data

• VA data is based on mail/online surveys collected from October 2018 - September 2019. There are 281,961 respondents for PCMH survey and 245,447 respondents for Specialty Care survey.
• Facility Level scores are suppressed for measures with less than 100 respondents.
• VA Primary Care survey is based on CAHPS Clinician & Group 3.0 core survey with Patient Centered Medical Home item set. The survey is administered to patients recently receiving primary care services.
• VA Specialty Care survey is based on CAHPS Clinician & Group 3.0 core survey. The survey is administered to patients recently receiving specialty care services.

VA results and CAHPS benchmarks are not adjusted for patient-mix, practice-site characteristics, and mode of survey administration.

Assessing Health Care Quality from the Patient's Perspective

The VA uses the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) family of surveys to measure patient experiences. CAHPS was developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and is considered the industry standard for measuring patient experiences. More information about the CAHPS family of surveys can be found here.

VA uses the CAHPS Clinician & Group Survey (CG-CAHPS), which asks patients to report on their experiences with primary or specialty care received from providers and their staff in ambulatory settings. VA uses a Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model for delivering primary care that is patient-centered, comprehensive, coordinated, accessible, and continuously improved through a systems-based approach to measurement and reporting. As such, VA administers the CG-CAHPS with the PCMH item set for patients seen in the primary care setting. CAHPS national and regional averages (where available) were obtained from the CG-CAHPS Database Online Reporting System (ORS).

Patient Population Difference

The comparisons in this report have one significant limitation, VA results and CAHPS benchmarks are not adjusted for patient-mix, practice-site characteristics, and mode of survey administration. There is no industry standard method for fairly comparing performance on ambulatory CAHPS measures among hospitals or health systems. This is because direct comparisons do not adjust scores for factors known to influence how patients rate their healthcare experience. Medicare and Medicaid enrollees, for example, do not have the same population characteristics as Veterans using the VA. Veterans are more likely to have a greater disease burden (i.e., poor health status) and are made up of far fewer women. These characteristics account for some of the differences reported between VA and CAHPS benchmark scores.

For More Information

Additional measures of VA patient experience can be found on the VA.gov Quality of Care website within the How Does Your VA Health Experience Rate? webpage. By clicking on the aforementioned link you will leave the Access and Quality in VA Healthcare site and be directed to the VA Quality of Care website.