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Speaker 0: Hi, everyone. This is Erica Card with the Becker healthcare care podcast. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Or we're joined by 2 leaders who are gonna be sharing more with us about forthcoming changes to the hospital consumer assessment of healthcare care providers and systems, Better known as h caps. For this 1, I'm happy to welcome Susan Edge Levi, executive Director of the John D S center, for primary care innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Casey C, corporate compliance, communications manager at Nrc Health. Susan and Casey, thanks so much for taking the time to be on the podcast today. To get us started, can you both share just a bit more about your roles and your organizations? Speaker 1: So I'm the director of the s center for primary care innovation that works with all of our primary care practice. To mass general on patient experience improvement activities, culture, work within our practices, And I also am the 1 of the 4 Pis on the national consumer assessment of healthcare care providers and systems study funded by the agency for healthcare research and quality. Speaker 2: Great, Casey? Hi. So I've been with Nrc Health for about 5 years in the corporate compliance group, and we are the group in Nrc that is focused on cats. I'm the communications manager, so I have the pleasure of working directly with our partners and also facilitating internal communications about caps. Speaker 0: You know, lots of expertise here on patient experience data, So excited to to get into it. Susan's at a high level, can you help explain the why behind these upcoming 20 25 changes to h caps? Yes. Speaker 1: We always as part of the the work that we do with all the cap surveys. We root keenly review them, because things need to be updated. And we try to keep them as relevant to the way clinical care is being delivered. And also what is in... What is, I think the most important thing to make sure that they are addressing the things that patients tell us are the most important aspects of quality when they're in the hospital, and those evolve over time. Speaker 0: Yeah. Absolutely. Lots of changes happening every year? And Casey, what are you hearing from Nrc health? Partner hospitals and systems about these upcoming changes and how's your team providing support there? Speaker 2: Overall, we're getting really good feedback I think our partners are feeling very positive about the changes. The introduction of web modes has been highly anticipated. I think people are very excited. About that. As far as my team providing support, it's our job to really provide expertise and resources to ensure success. So We do a monthly newsletter called the caps insider. That's about Cms news and all things caps. We're doing caps insider live. Webcast, which is a really great opportunity to get some live information Have your questions answered, or you can listen to the recordings after. We do direct communications with our partners and, like I mentioned work internally with customer success managers and project specialists to make for sure their informed and equipped to help our partners achieve their goals. Speaker 0: Yeah. So Like a variety of roots for for support their Now we know that Cms will limit the number of supplemental items to 12 to align with its other patient experience surveys. So, Susan, what's your take on this specific change? Speaker 1: I think this is a change that the caps researchers. Was very, very excited about because we want to do everything possible so to make sure that we get the best response rates we can and also to make sure that we're hearing from all patients and especially patients that might be underrepresented in survey research. And by limiting the number of supplemental items to 12, we know from our other research about how to enhance response rates, that will hopefully make a big difference and we're very excited about that, because we we know in some instances, people add many many more items to h caps, and that definitely has affected the quality of the data and the response rates and also the population that we're hearing from. So we're very happy about it. Speaker 0: Casey, is there anything else you'd add on on the limitation of the stuff mental items there? Speaker 2: Definitely, yeah. We're working with our partners now who currently have more than 12 questions to really identify which of those questionable students will be the most impactful to their organizations in which they should keep or maybe alter to be better encompassing and not have to ask quite so many. I think this is gonna end up being a very positive change. Like Susan said, increasing response rates. It's very important so that we can really capture that feedback. So Speaker 0: Yeah. And and on the topic of improving response rates, know the data collection period for the surveys. Also being extended. So can you both share share how you expect that to also affect response rates Speaker 1: we we are very happy about the extended, you know, time to respond to the surveys because We know that the people that responded to these surveys are actually people that have had the best experiences. And if you look at the response data by how long it takes someone to respond. The longer that the surveys are in the field. The more accurate data we get because the people that have the most negative experiences tend to respond at the very end of the field period. We think that's because there's a lot of, conflicting feelings about saying negative things about care that you received. There's worry about anonymity and that if you say negative things that your care might get worse. The next time you come into the hospital and those sorts of things. But we know that extending the response period will increase response rates And the other thing that is really important. Is that it also increases who responds to the survey. So people that tend to be underrepresented in patient experience surveys are much more likely to respond, the longer that field period is open. Speaker 0: Yeah. And Casey, anything else on the effect on response times in terms of the survey being extended. Speaker 2: I agree. I think this is just a really citing change that's gonna give us an opportunity to have a more holistic picture of our patient feedback. So just getting that whole sure is is so important and I think this Speaker 0: is gonna be great. Yeah. It's interesting to hear about the trends of demographics in which groups of people tend to respond respond to different times and how this, just extending it will help overall in terms of rep representation of all those groups, to Now looking ahead, what are some best practices for health organizations to ensure that they're adapting effectively to all these updates. And also maintaining a focus on improving patient care. Speaker 1: I think 1 thing that I wanna mention is that... The content of the cover letters that go out with the H cap surveys or for any survey for that matter, really make a difference when people understand in the cover letter that's inviting them to respond, how the data will be used who will have access to it, to address the anonymity issue, and why it's so important for improvement. We actually see response rates go up So I think that's something that I would encourage everyone to think about and to make sure that the cover letters that your patients are receiving are very clear. In terms of how much the organization values this feedback, how there... There's no penalty for responding accurately to what your actual experience was like that people really wanna hear all the voices of their patients. So that they can use the information for improvement. Speaker 0: Yeah. Absolutely. It sounds like it's important to tackle any up. Potential barriers or questions about how the data will be used upfront like you mentioned with those cover letters. Anything else from Casey on best practice as healthcare organization should keep in mind in terms of these updates? Speaker 2: I think to satisfy the requirements of the updates, some basic things that are really important. To remember or, if you're not already capturing your patient's preferred languages. That's an important thing to make sure you're on top of moving forward, important And if you're interested in web mode administration to make sure you have a high capture rate of email addresses so that we're able to reach those patients. Speaker 1: I just wanna underscore what you just heard about capturing accurate email addresses and preferred language. Because the H cap survey is available in lots of different languages, but not everybody knows that, and I know ceo knows that, and offers it in different languages, but that is really, really important. So I'm really glad you brought that up. Speaker 0: Well, Casey and Susan, thank you both so much for being on today. And really appreciate your insights. We also wanna thank our podcast sponsor Nrc health. And listeners, you can tune in to additional episodes of the podcast by visiting the podcast page on our website at Becker Hospital review. Dot com. Thank you all. Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you.