Raising HCAHPS Scores. Annotated Bibliography Essay

Raising HCAHPS Scores. Annotated Bibliography - Essay Example Bower, K. A. (2009). Managing Care: The Crucial Nursing–Case Management Partnership. Nurse Leader 26-29. This article does not explicitly dwell on the improvement of HCAHPS scores in a hospital. However, the article introduces the concept of case management and its relationship with the cost benefits that an institution accrues once it implements effective and efficient case management in its operations. In this case, the author identifies the goals to effective case management as laying emphasis on clinical outcomes, satisfaction of patients, and compliance goals, which are elements that have a relationship with the importance of raising HCAHPS scores in an organization. Importantly, the author related the importance of effective case management with the financial incentives that an organization accrues. The author indicated that Medicare’s Recovery Audit Contractor program retracted more than $800 million from acute hospitals in three states during a demonstration project, although the program is now in practice in all the states. Hence, this implies that effective case management, which is associated with nursing and quality of care, is an important aspect of ensuring financial incentives in a hospital. On the other hand, improving effective case management improves the quality of care and has an effect on the improvement of HCAHPS scores in a hospital. ... tes to the clinical process, which accounts for 70% of the performance score while the remaining percentage is the patient experience domain, which is the basis for the HCAHPS score. In line with this, Cliff highlights the cost benefits aspect of including these measures in provision of incentives to a hospital that provided quality care. Cliff not only highlights the importance of improving the quality of care by raising HCAHPS scores in a hospital, but also discusses the existence of financial rewards associated with the raising of these scores. Elliot, M. N., Lehrman, W. G., Goldstein, E., Hambarsoomian, K., Beckett, M. K., & Giodano, L. A. (2009). Do Hospitals Rank Differently on HCAHPS for Different Patient Subgroups? Medical Care Research and Review 67(1): 56-73. The authors take a patient-centered approach towards establishing HCAHPS measures while precisely focusing on the aspect of patients’ experiences in a hospital setting. The authors describe the reliability of pa tient-reported measures within the hospital levels, which is through investigating the extent of observable differences within a hospital setting and their representation as true differences in experiences. Using patients’ experiences in nine measures, the researchers used the experiences of 1,203,229 patients discharged from hospitals around the country between 2006 and 2007 with these patients being a blend of patients who visited acute and critical access hospitals. Importantly, the researchers found out that raising HCAHPS scores in the hospital setting is crucial in measuring the distinction of the quality of care in a hospital and this distinction contributes to high reliability in a hospital setting. In effect, these researchers bring out the theory of high reliability in service design