In the­ previous post in this series, we introduced the scoring for Home Health CAHPS—the three composite and two global scores. Understanding how they are constructed is a crucial first step in improving an agency’s scores.

In this article, we will begin reviewing the individual questions and improvements in the Care of Patients composite.

These improvement suggestions are for working with staff in your organization to mutually work on innovative methods for improving the scores, and are not intended to be used for coaching patients on answering the right way.

The Care of Patients composite score comprises individual questions assessing how often the home health team gives care in a professional manner. The response options are displayed in the table and the score is based on the response of the patients completing the survey.

Improving these Home Health CAHPS questions requires a commitment to building a culture of continuous quality improvement, and involving all staff in the implementation of improvement beyond the standardized Home Health CAHPS questions. The following Care of Patient questions are followed with a starter set of improvement suggestions that can serve as an initial point for working with staff in your agency to improve these measures.

In the next installment, we will review the questions associated with the Home Health CAHPS survey in the composite for Communications between Providers and Patients.