The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, better known as HCAHPS (pronounced H-caps), is the national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patients' perspectives of hospital care -- an increasingly important metric as hospitals learn to treat patients more like consumers and pay more attention to consumer choice. The HCAHPS survey, its methodology, and its results were first publicly reported in March 2008. This reporting creates incentives for hospitals to improve healthcare quality and also increases accountability by increasing transparency into hospitals' quality of care.
