Current Environment:

 

The Child Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (Child HCAHPS) Survey is a survey of parents or guardians about pediatric inpatient experience of care. Funded through the Pediatric Quality Measures Program (PQMP) by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Center of Excellence for Pediatric Quality Measurement (CEPQM) developed Child HCAHPS as a measure that can be used nationally by payers (public and private), providers, and consumers for public reporting, quality management, and tracking purposes. The instrument has 18 single-item and composite measures categorized into 5 overarching groups: communication with parent, communication with child, attention to safety and comfort, hospital environment, and hospital rating. The measures are case-mix adjusted. Child HCAHPS allows for the tracking of quality improvement within individual hospitals and for the comparison of quality across pediatric settings. The survey is endorsed by the National Quality Forum (NQF).

CEPQM developed the measure in collaboration with the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Consortium. Child HCAHPS was built on the core domains of the Adult HCAHPS instrument. Many items featured in the survey are derived from the existing HCAHPS instrument and are adapted for pediatric care. In addition, new questions reflect expanded domains and new domains identified as important through the survey development process.

For more general information, please see ARHQ's CAHPS website and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's CAHPS Resources. For more information about the survey development process and where to download the survey and instructions for its administration, please see: Development and Content.

Child HCAHPS Core Team

  • Marc Elliott, PhD (RAND)
  • Floyd Fowler Jr., PhD (University of Massachusetts Boston)
  • Patricia Gallagher, PhD (University of Massachusetts Boston)
  • David Klein, MS (RAND and Boston Children's Hospital)
  • Mark Schuster, MD, PhD (Measure Co-Leader; Kaiser Permanente, Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School)
  • Sara Toomey, MD, MPH, MPhil, MSc (Measure Co-Leader; Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School)
  • Alan Zaslavsky, PhD (Harvard Medical School)