The CAHPS Hospital Survey has been through extensive testing since the fall of 2003.
Pilot testing. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) conducted pilot tests of the draft instrument through a contract with the Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs) in three states: Arizona, Maryland, and New York. This pilot test included 132 hospitals and resulted in over 19,000 completed surveys. Testing began in June 2003 and ended in August 2003.
Focus groups. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and CMS conducted six focus groups with consumers in October 2003 and another 10 in March 2004. These focus groups were conducted in four cities and included adults who had recently been in a hospital or who were caregivers for someone who had recently been in a hospital.
Additional field testing. Over a 6-month period beginning in the fall of 2003, the CAHPS Consortium tested the instrument in five volunteer sites encompassing over 375 hospitals:
- Calgary Health Region
- California Institute for Health System Performance
- California Regions of Kaiser Permanente
- Massachusetts General Hospital, and
- Premier Incorporated
The CAHPS Team used these field tests to learn more about the instrument, sampling processes, data collection processes, and other issues to survey implementation.
Pre-implementation testing. In the summer of 2004, the CAHPS Consortium worked with hospitals and vendors that volunteered to test the current instrument in order to identify ways to minimize the potential burden and disruption posed by the survey. Working with these test sites, researchers investigated various approaches to integrating the survey items into existing questionnaires as well as alternative protocols for administering the survey.
More pre-implementation testing took place in the spring and summer of 2005. Participants used this opportunity to integrate their own items into the CAHPS Hospital Survey and experiment with other issues related to sampling and survey administration.
