Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) 2022 virtual research meeting summary: Assessing patient experience for insights into enhancing equity in healthcare (20 September 2022)

Summary

This report documents a meeting held in September 2022 that explored how Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) surveys shed light on disparities in patient experience and how improved measurement can advance healthcare equity in the US. Over 600 CAHPS survey users, researchers, healthcare organisation leaders, patient advocates, policymakers, Federal partners and the CAHPS Consortium attended.

Content

Key themes

• There are many inequities across sociodemographic groups with respect to access to, and the quality of, health and healthcare services.
• Addressing and eliminating health inequities in patient experiences requires accurate measurement of differences in care experiences and reporting findings.
• Effectively addressing healthcare inequities requires improvements in data collection and data quality, and use of statistical techniques, such as stratified analyses to inform quality improvement efforts.
• Producing data that assess health equity and inform equity-targeted quality improvement requires both accurate identification of underserved groups and better response rates from those populations.
• Data should be collected only if there are specific plans to use them.