When Quality Reporting Becomes Burdensome
Patient satisfaction surveys could be more trouble than they're worth.
T
he OAS CAHPS CMS survey is a bureaucrat's delight.
Everything about it is overdone and overbearing, from its
clunky 11-word name to its 37 questions — many of which are
highly intrusive of your patients' personal information — to its threat
to withhold 2% of your Medicare reimbursement as penalty for not
complying with a voluntary quality reporting program that becomes
mandatory for all ambulatory surgery centers and hospital outpatient
departments on Jan. 1 — unless, of course, Medicare finds reason to
push back the start of the survey known as the ... deep breath ...
Outpatient and Ambulatory Surgery Consumer Assessment of
Healthcare Providers and Systems by 100 or so days.
Just what you need, says healthcare attorney Mark F. Weiss, "forced
compliance with yet another governmental program imposed on
already overworked ASC administrators and staff."
"Are Your Ready for OAS CAHPS?" on page 60 answers many of the
questions you might have about the satisfaction survey that asks your
patients about nausea, bleeding, pain, infection and discharge instruc-
tions. Survey response options are Yes, Definitely; Yes, Somewhat;
and No.
But in typical bureaucratic fashion, how patients answer doesn't
really matter. OAS CAHPS is pay for reporting, not pay for perform-
ance. What matters to CMS is whether you meet the data submission
requirements, not the score. Yes, your score will be publicly reported
and one day CMS might apply its hospital star rating system to sur-
gery centers based on quality reporting, but all CMS cares about is
that, starting in 2018, you complete 300 surveys in a year.
"The entire quality reporting system is still only pay for play, not
(yet, anyhow) pay for performance. Sort of like pass/fail," says David
6 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J U L Y 2 0 1 7
Editor's Page
Dan O'Connor
