HealthStream Launches HCAHPS Preparation & Improvement Library

Business Wire, Sept 25, 2008

Public Reporting of Patients' Perceptions of Care Drives Need for Hospital Staff Training on Patient Survey; Reporting of Survey Results Tied to Full CMS Reimbursement

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- HealthStream, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSTM), a leading provider of research and learning solutions for the healthcare industry, today announced the launch of its HCAHPS Preparation and Improvement Library courseware. This online courseware focuses hospital staff at all levels and functions on behaviors that improve patients' experiences of their stay in the hospital. As the title suggests, this course correlates directly to the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS, pronounced "H-caps"), which is a patient survey that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) require that hospitals institute. Each hospital's survey results are reported to CMS and posted on the public site, www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov , as a condition for full Medicare reimbursement updates from CMS.

As an early adopter of HealthStream's HCAHPS Preparation and Improvement Library, Vanasse Quiambao, staff education & performance improvement coordinator at El Paso Specialty Hospital, commented, "At El Paso Specialty Hospital, we are taking progressive steps to make our patient experiences the best they can possibly be. The HealthStream HCAHPS courseware, which teaches directly to the HCAHPS survey and the patient experiences it measures, supports our efforts to deliver the highest level of quality care for patients."

"HealthStream's launch of the HCAHPS Preparation and Improvement Library provides another way that we are enabling our customers to translate insight into action" said J. Edward Pearson, president, HealthStream Research. "Insight is gained through HCAHPS results and this new library offers healthcare organizations an opportunity to take action by training their staff to recognize the importance of their everyday behaviors and actions on the results of the survey."

The HCAHPS survey is composed of 27 questions--18 involving patient perspectives on seven key topics: communication with doctors, communication with nurses, responsiveness of hospital staff, cleanliness and quietness of hospital environment, pain management, communication about medicines, and discharge information. The other nine questions include four screener questions and five demographic items. Development of the survey began in 2002 by CMS in partnership with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), another agency in the federal Department of Health and Human Services. After three years of collaboration with other healthcare quality organizations, the federal Office of Management and Budget gave its final approval for the national implementation of HCAHPS for public reporting purposes. The first posting of healthcare organizations' HCAHPS results occurred earlier this year in March.

By taking HealthStream's HCAHPS Preparation and Improvement Library courses, hospital personnel become familiar with the items on the survey, thus increasing awareness of their behaviors that have an impact on patients' experiences in the hospital. Recent social scientific research has proven that cognitively priming an individual about a behavior significantly increases the likelihood of subsequently enacting that behavior--as long as the behavior is perceived as a positive action. In this way, the HCAHPS courseware can prime healthcare professionals about the behaviors being queried on the HCAHPS survey, thus increasing the likelihood of those professionals actually employing the positive behaviors in delivering patient care. This, in turn, should result in increased levels of patient satisfaction with their care and hospital stay---and corresponding improved HCAHPS scores.

"The development of our HCAHPS Preparation and Improvement Library courseware embodies HealthStream's vision to improve the quality of healthcare by developing the people who deliver care. It combines the knowledge and depth of expertise of HealthStream Research with our industry-leading learning platform and allows us to provide an instructional tool that is unmatched in supporting patient care organizations," said Robert A. Frist, Jr., chief executive officer, HealthStream.

About HealthStream

HealthStream (NASDAQ: HSTM) is a leading provider of research and learning solutions for the healthcare industry, transforming insight into action to deliver outcomes-based results for healthcare organizations. Through HealthStream's learning solutions--which have been contracted by over 1.7 million hospital-based healthcare professionals--healthcare organizations create safer environments for patients, increase clinical competencies of their workforces, and facilitate the rapid transfer of the latest knowledge and technologies. Through our research products, executives from healthcare organizations gain valuable insight about patients' experiences, workforce challenges, physician relations, and community perceptions of their services. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, HealthStream has two satellite offices. For more information about HealthStream's learning and research solutions, visit www.healthstream.com or call us at 800-933-9293.