Correlation Between Purposeful Patient Medication Education and Patient Experience Scores

The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) is a national grading system that is used by payors to determine patients’ perception of their hospital stay. This public benchmarking system is tied to reimbursements and encompasses several domain areas. The medication and nursing domain questions revolve around how the nursing staff explained the purpose and possible side effects of patient medication. This project targeted a medical-surgical unit in a suburban faith-based hospital that was not meeting the national benchmarks in the nursing domain. The purpose of this evidence-based practice project, which was conducted using the Iowa Model of Evidence-Based Practice, was to implement a purposeful nurse-patient medication education program on a medical-surgical unit to increase the unit’s patient experience scores. The project incorporated nurse-patient medication education utilizing written, verbal, and visual modalities. Initially, the nurses were educated on the new design of medication education and the importance of the education in relation to HCAHPS scores. The impact of the education was evaluated through a comparison of the nurses’ preimplementation and 10-week postimplementation surveys. In addition, the HCAHPS scores were reviewed after the 10-week implementation period. A month-to-month increase in scores was seen after the inception of the project. This finding revealed a correlation between purposeful patient education and increased patient experience scores. The pre- and post survey nursing survey demonstrated nurses’ increased understanding of the patient experience survey