Interventions that improve patient experience evidenced by raising HCAHPS and CG-CAHPS Scores: A narrative literature review

Hospital administrators and researchers often use large, standardized surveys that examine patient satisfaction to evaluate whether interventions improve patient experience. To summarize the breadth of these interventions and how large, standardized surveys are used to evaluate them, a multidisciplinary research team conducted a review. They used PubMed and Google Scholar searches, reviews of reference lists and targeted searches to locate studies. They evaluated one hundred and twenty-four articles and fifty-eight articles met the inclusion criteria for the narrative review. Using the standard methodology for narrative reviews, the authors synthesize salient themes in the articles and highlight exemplar studies. The review is qualitative, limited, and subjective, and provides a novel analysis of a selection of important and recent research studies. Interventions are in four domains: communication, information and communication technologies (ICT’s), nursing, and the healthcare environment. The majority evaluate patient experiences using the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) or the Clinician and Group Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CG-CAHPS), two widely used, standardized, validated surveys to measure patient experience. Results suggest that verbal, non-verbal, and empathetic communication studies are especially salient in the literature. Research about ICT’s includes promising interventions that need additional testing using large datasets. Finally, many studies evaluate nursing and the healthcare environment, but evaluations of interventions in these areas are often inconclusive because nursing and healthcare environments vary widely within and between hospital systems. The review reveals reliable innovations, inconclusive research, as well as many directions for future research.