Guides CAHPS
What is CAHPS?
Written by Mike Cameron, Canopy Last updated
CAHPS — the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, pronounced "caps" — is a family of standardized patient experience surveys developed through the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Each version measures a different care setting: HCAHPS for hospital stays, OAS CAHPS for outpatient surgery, HHCAHPS for home health, and more. CMS requires several of them and publicly reports the results.
What does CAHPS stand for?
Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems. The program started at AHRQ in 1995 with a simple premise: patients are the only reliable witnesses to some parts of care — whether anyone explained the medicines, whether help came when called — so measuring those things should be standardized, comparable, and public. Every CAHPS survey asks about what happened, not how the patient felt — that’s what makes results comparable between organizations.
Which CAHPS survey covers what?
Each member of the family measures one care setting. The ones a hospital or health system most often deals with:
| Survey | Care setting | Required? |
|---|---|---|
| HCAHPS | Hospital inpatient stays | Required for hospitals paid under Medicare's IPPS; most Critical Access Hospitals field it through MBQIP |
| OAS CAHPS | Outpatient and ambulatory surgery | Fielded by hospital outpatient departments and ambulatory surgery centers under CMS quality reporting programs |
| HHCAHPS | Home health care | Required for Medicare-certified home health agencies (smallest agencies can be exempt) |
| Hospice CAHPS | Hospice care (asked of family caregivers) | Required for Medicare-certified hospices |
| ED CAHPS | Emergency department visits | Voluntary — never tied to payment, so most hospitals that survey the ED use a more flexible instrument instead (see the note below) |
| CG CAHPS | Clinician and group practice visits | Voluntary in most uses; common in medical groups |
| Nursing Home CAHPS | Nursing home residents and families | Voluntary |
The family extends further — dialysis (ICH CAHPS), health plans, and more — but the rows above are the ones that land on a hospital’s desk.
One note on the emergency department: no payment rule ever forces the official ED instrument, and a standardized survey limits what you can ask — so hospitals that survey the ED usually do it for the insight, with an instrument built for that. Our ED Surveys line is exactly that: an emergency-department survey designed around the questions your ED actually needs answered, not the CMS version.
What makes CAHPS different from a survey you could write yourself?
Three things. The questions are standardized, so your results are comparable to every other hospital’s — a homemade survey can only compare you to yourself. The administration runs on strict protocols — who gets sampled, when, and how — so numbers aren’t shaped by who happened to be handed a form. And for the required lines, results are publicly reported, which is why CAHPS scores show up in board meetings in a way internal surveys never do. (How the scores themselves work is its own topic — see How is HCAHPS scored?)
Which CAHPS surveys does your organization need?
Follow what you operate. Run an inpatient hospital paid under Medicare’s prospective payment system? HCAHPS. Do outpatient surgeries or procedures? OAS CAHPS. Own a Medicare-certified home health agency? HHCAHPS. A hospice? Hospice CAHPS. A busy emergency department you want to understand? That one’s a choice, not a mandate — and because nothing requires the official instrument, most hospitals field a flexible ED survey that asks what they actually want to know. For a Critical Access Hospital, the list usually arrives all at once — because the same small organization runs most of those services for its community.
The rural reality: one hospital, many hats.
A rural health system is often an inpatient hospital, an outpatient surgery department, a home health agency, and a swing-bed program in one building — which can mean three or four CAHPS lines, each with its own protocol, running at once. Splitting them across vendors multiplies contracts, file feeds, and dashboards. Running them through one platform means one team that knows your organization and one place where the whole community’s experience shows up. That’s the way we’ve run it for 11 years.
Quick answers.
Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems. It's pronounced "caps." The program began at the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in 1995.
CAHPS is the whole survey family; HCAHPS is the family's hospital inpatient survey — the best-known member. The "H" is the giveaway: Hospital CAHPS.
Some are, depending on what you run: HCAHPS for hospitals paid under Medicare's inpatient payment system, HHCAHPS for Medicare-certified home health agencies, Hospice CAHPS for hospices, and OAS CAHPS for outpatient surgery settings under CMS quality reporting. Others — the emergency department and clinician-group surveys, for example — are voluntary, and since nothing mandates the official instrument there, many hospitals survey those settings with a more flexible instrument of their own.
AHRQ develops and maintains the survey instruments; CMS requires specific versions in specific care settings and publishes the results. Hospitals typically contract an approved survey vendor to field them.
Yes — and for organizations wearing several hats (hospital, outpatient surgery, home health), one vendor means one protocol relationship and one set of dashboards. That's exactly how Canopy Surveys is built.
Keep reading: What is HCAHPS? — a closer look at the family’s flagship, the survey every hospital deals with first.
Sources: AHRQ CAHPS program (official) · HCAHPS Online
Every CAHPS line. One trusted platform.
Canopy runs the whole family — HCAHPS and OAS CAHPS with our own CMS approvals — for rural hospitals and Critical Access Hospitals.