Industry Note:
Some De-Identified CAHPS Data Banned
Published on Thu Jul 26, 2012
Home health agencies trying to figure out how patient satisfaction varies among different types of patients won't get much help from their HHCAHPS data.CMS has prohibited Home Health Con-sumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Sys-tems survey vendors from providing de-identified data from the "About You" section of the survey (Questions 26-32) to agencies unless patients consent to share the data. "Without the patient's consent to share his or her survey responses, providing survey responses to the questions that ask for health status and demographic information ... may enable HHAs with small sample sizes to link survey responses to a specific patient," HHCAHPS vendor RTI explains on the CAHPS website.It is still acceptable to provide de-identified survey responses to the core HHCAHPS questions (Questions 1-- 25), RTI allows.
