Guides HCAHPS questions
What are the HCAHPS survey questions?
Written by Mike Cameron, Canopy Last updated
The HCAHPS survey asks recently discharged hospital patients a standardized set of questions about their stay: how often nurses and doctors communicated well, how responsive staff were, whether medicines and discharge instructions were explained, how clean and quiet the room was — plus an overall 0–10 rating and whether they'd recommend the hospital. The questions are set by CMS, identical at every hospital, and the current official questionnaire is available from HCAHPS Online.
What topics do the questions cover?
The survey groups its questions into measures, each built from one to three questions on a topic:
- Communication with nurses — Courtesy and respect, listening carefully, explaining things understandably.
- Communication with doctors — The same three behaviors, asked about physicians.
- Responsiveness of staff — Help arriving when called — including help to the bathroom.
- Communication about medicines — Whether new medicines were explained: what they were for, possible side effects.
- Hospital environment — Cleanliness and quietness of the patient's room and surroundings.
- Discharge and care transition — Whether patients left knowing what to do, what symptoms to watch for, and felt their preferences were considered.
- Global items — The overall 0–10 hospital rating and willingness to recommend.
Screening questions (did you get new medicines? did you need help?) route patients past items that don’t apply, and an “About You” section collects the demographics CMS uses for patient-mix adjustment.
How are the questions answered?
Most questions use a four-point frequency scale — Never, Sometimes, Usually, Always — because the survey measures whether good care happened reliably, not whether the patient was satisfied on average. In public reporting only “Always” counts toward the score (how HCAHPS scoring works is its own guide). The overall rating runs 0–10, and the recommend question from “Definitely no” to “Definitely yes.”
What can hospitals change?
Nothing in the core — no rewording, no reordering, no cherry-picking. What hospitals can do is add supplemental questions after the core survey, following the protocol’s rules. Done well, supplemental items are how you get answers to your questions (the new wing, the discharge pharmacy program) while the core stays comparable. Done badly, they make the survey long enough that completion suffers — part of designing them is knowing when to stop.
Which version is current?
CMS updates the instrument periodically — a 2025 update refreshed several measures and added web-based survey modes — so searches for “HCAHPS survey questions 2025” are really asking “what changed?” The safe habit: always work from the current official questionnaire and translations on HCAHPS Online (linked below), not from an old PDF in a shared drive. If your survey vendor is doing its job, the current instrument is its problem, not yours — that’s part of what a CMS-approved HCAHPS vendor is for.
Quick answers.
Yes — that's the point. The core questions are standardized by CMS and identical everywhere, which is what makes results comparable between hospitals.
The core questions can't be changed, reworded, or reordered. Hospitals may add their own supplemental questions after the core survey, following the protocol's rules — a common way to gather extra detail without touching comparability.
Most use a four-point frequency scale — Never, Sometimes, Usually, Always. The overall rating is 0–10, the recommend question runs from "Definitely no" to "Definitely yes," and a few screening and demographic items round out the survey.
Periodically. CMS refreshed several measures and added web-based survey modes in a 2025 update. Always work from the current official questionnaire on HCAHPS Online rather than an old PDF.
From HCAHPS Online (hcahpsonline.org), the official CMS site — including approved translations. It's free and public.
Keep reading: How is HCAHPS scored? — what happens to these answers after the patient mails them back.
Sources: HCAHPS Online — official questionnaire & translations
The questions are CMS’s. The fielding is ours.
Canopy runs HCAHPS end to end — current instrument, exact protocol, supplemental items designed with you.