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.