Have hospitals improved their patient experience in the USA?

In this Project I used the data from the American Health Association from the year 2015 up until 2023. As the data analyst I’ve been asked to analyze the Hospital Consumer Assessment of healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey results. The goal of this project is to improve the quality of care in hospitals.

The Data provided had results from different facilities in various states with measures and their responses broken down onto three categories which are as follows:

•    Top Box: Answers which are considered more positive.
  

•    Middle Box: Answers which are considered intermediate.
  

•    Bottom Box: answers which are considered least positive.
  

My task was to evaluate whether the HCAHPS survey has been successful in accomplishing its goal by answering the following questions:

•     Have hospitals' HCAHPS scores improved over the past 9 years?
  

•     Are there any specific areas where hospitals have made more progress than others?
  

•     Are there any major areas of opportunity remaining?
  

•     What recommendations can you make to hospitals to help them further improve the patient’s experience?
  

After analyzing the data and providing the visuals for the top management to validate and review the findings I found that.

•     The hospitals ratings had been improving from the years 2015-2021, however from the year 2021 onwards it seems that there is a downward trend that began to form as the top box results were decreasing vs bottom and middle box results increasing during these years.
  

•     To answer the question on whether the hospitals have made more progress than others I have created a heat map to track any improvement in the measures. Looking at the heat map we can see that there are three main measures where the hospitals had seen some improvements up until the last two years where the downward trend began, these measures are identified as follows:
  

o Communication with nurses

o Discharge Information

o Overall hospital rating

•     To identify whether there are any areas for improvement or not, I utilized the measure and the bottom box responses for said measures. I began by only showing the top 5 measures that have the highest bottom box results. This would indicate to me that these areas have not been explored and still possess opportunities to improve.
  

•     My final recommendation for the hospitals to improve the patient’s experience would be to first begin by utilizing the dashboard to spot their weakness and turn it into an opportunity. As we can see there are many measures where the hospitals are poorly performing in. Additionally, the average response rate is considered significantly low. I would also recommend the hospitals to encourage more patients in completing the survey to gather the maximum amount of data to improve the accuracy of the results.