Surveys such as Press Ganey and HCHAPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) can be great tools for evaluating the patient experience, but they don’t work for every patient and every healthcare setting.
That’s why a team from Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital (YNHPH) spent the past several years developing a survey specifically for their behavioral health inpatients. The team’s work recently earned some prestigious recognition. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) decided to incorporate the YNHPH survey into its nationwide Inpatient Psychiatric Facility Quality Reporting Program, which gives consumers information about care quality to help them make more informed decisions about their healthcare options.
The team that developed the YNHPH survey comprised researchers and clinicians from Psychiatry, Psychology, Nursing, Social Work and Occupational Therapy. In researching existing tools to measure patients’ experiences, team members discovered a wide variation in how behavioral health organizations gather data, and a general lack of consensus around an accurate survey tool.
The team developed their own survey and piloted it with patients who had been hospitalized for various behavioral health concerns. The team identified four factors integral to inpatients’ experience: treatment team relationships, nursing team presence, treatment effectiveness and healing environment. They incorporated these factors into the survey that is now used at YNHPH. In 2026, the survey will be required for use in more than 1,600 inpatient behavioral health facilities nationwide that participate in the CMS Inpatient Psychiatric Facility Quality Reporting Program.
“CMS’ adoption of our survey is a well-deserved recognition of the hard work of many people at Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital,” said Mark Sevilla, RN, DNP, vice president, Behavioral Health and Emergency Services, Yale New Haven Hospital. “We are proud of the fact that what began as a local effort to improve the care we provide to our patients has become a national standard. We are also pleased that behavioral health patients and clinicians now have an evidence-based tool to guide them in providing the highest-quality, patient-centered care.”
