News: U.S. News and World Report plans to abandon PSIs, embrace HCAHPS

U.S. News & World Report plans to stop using patient safety indicators (PSI) as a metric, no longer factoring those measures into its specialty rankings of the nation’s best hospitals. Instead, it will substitute hospital consumer assessment of healthcare providers and systems (HCAHPS) ratings, which measure patient satisfaction through a survey, HealthcareDive reported.

“Not everyone is going to be thrilled with this change,” said Ben Harder, chief of health analysis for U.S. News & World Report, during the publication’s annual Healthcare of Tomorrow conference in Washington, D.C. “We’ve seen enough literature over the years that raise questions about the validity of these measures.”

PSI reporting, however, can also be fraught with difficulties, too. Sometimes, a patient may be incorrectly placed into a PSI because of an error in documentation—an issue CDI professionals know well. That inaccuracy can have profound negative effects on the facility’s publicly reported quality data if not corrected quickly.

Despite the anticipated concerns over the validity of the HCAHPS measures, U.S. News & World Report plans to move forward with their plan as patients are increasingly looking for greater transparency, according to HealthcareDive.

Though the HCAHPS measures won’t likely be included in 2019’s ratings, it’s something U.S. News & World Report plans to continue work on and incorporate in the near future.

Editor’s note: To read HealthcareDive’s coverage of this story, click here. To read about the 2018-2019 hospital rankings from U.S. News & World Report, click here.