Patient Satisfaction

The HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) is the first nationally standardized survey that patient feedback on the quality of care they receive. Using a dataset from Kaggle, I take a deeper dive into variations in patient satisfaction from hospitals across the United States.

Guiding Questions

  • What are the differences in patient satisfaction from state to state?

  • How about differences across different hospital types and hospital ownership?

  • Is there a correlation between response rate and overall patient satisfaction?

  • Will we have any abnormal findings for 2020 given the unique situation presented by the pandemic?

Data Exploration

  • First we remove the spacing between words in the header column to make it easier to call columns in SQL

  • We will not need certain columns like linear mean score because overall score is derived from it, nor will we need the footnotes column

  • Some columns contain varying data types like HCAHPS response rate column which will need to be dealt with

  • This dataset was collected from Kaggle

Data Analysis

  • We have chosen Microsoft SQL studio to be our tool for analysis

  • Average Rating appear to be lower for the year of 2020

  • Government owned hospitals appear to have the worst ratings

  • We actually don’t need the linear mean score because the overall hospital rating is derived from it, additionally all data entries have a overall score but many are missing linear mean scores

  • Encountered type error when attempting to union four years of data

  • Resolved: HCAHPS Answer Percent is a float type for the datasets of 2019 and 2020, but nvarchar for 2018 and earlier, cast HCAHPS Answer Percent as nvarchar type in union statement

Visualization

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Now we get to do the fun stuff and actually tell the story:

  • We break down average HCAHPS scores to the state level as well as the individual hospital level

  • By plotting using R within PowerBI we are able to see that survey reponse rates typically equate to higher HCAHPS ratings at the state level.

  • We create custom measures in order use in various visualizations

  • We used DAX functions with DATEADD to find year over year change in survey response rates and count of total surveys

  • We created a dynamic top n field so the user can chose a variable number of hospitals by count of total survey responses

  • In order to aggregate total number of hospitals for various measures, the FacilityID field had to be used instead of FacilityName because there were hospitals in different states with the same name

Conclusions

  • HCAHPS ratings vary considerably by state and have a mild correlation with how many people actually complete the surveys 

  • Hospitals in the private sector, particularly those that are physician owned tend to have the highest ratings

  • The year 2020 did not seem to have a significant impact on HCAHPS ratings

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