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Why PRC Uses “Excellent” as Our Top Box Response

June 16, 2022

In today’s healthcare landscape, hospital leaders strive more than ever to optimize their top box survey performance. In CAHPS® surveys, it means higher VBP reimbursement and CMS star ratings. At PRC, we use “Excellent” as our top box response in our loyalty surveys compared to other survey vendors who measure with “Very Good.” This distinction both reflects our dedication to helping our client partners achieve excellence, and empowers our partners to track patient, physician, and employee loyalty, along with how they can be improved in an organization. All of which ultimately contribute to the goal of having more patients, employees, and physicians perceive your organization to be truly excellent.

On face value, the term “excellence” carries greater weight than simply “very good;” when thinking of institutions, terms like “Centers of Excellence” come to mind before “Centers of Very Good.” Beyond semantics, measuring for excellence has proven powerful for our client partners when gauging customer loyalty and measuring their organizational market share. Our research shows patients, physicians, and employees are four times more likely to recommend an organization they perceive as “excellent” vs. “very good.” Together, this distinction serves as a difference maker for survey recipients across the country when describing their perceptions of an organization and creates a higher standard for top box measurement that undeniably highlights the best possible outcomes.

Another distinction of our excellence measurement is its implication on the rest of our quality scale. Where other survey vendors may use the “very good-good-fair-poor-very poor” model when assessing quality of care, our five-point scale of “excellent-very good-good-fair-poor” creates a positive-heavy measurement. This is a conscious decision by our survey design team, recognizing that a majority of patients, care team members, and providers already have a positive opinion of your organization. Since they’re already likely to evaluate their survey positively, our scale offers deeper insight into how positive of an experience your organization provides. This extra layer of positive measurement also creates an opportunity for organizations to visualize improvement. While comparison data can be beneficial when measuring market share and competitive strength, comparing yourself to your own organization’s performance over time strikes at the core of improvement, answering the question of if you’re better today than last month, last quarter, or last year. Measuring for excellence provides the perspective to more clearly answer that question, equipping our client partners with insight to get one step closer to best-in-class healthcare performance.

Indeed, measuring for excellence is an intentional, strategic, and meaningful way to support our partners with accurate and actionable insights surrounding their customer experience. In an era where top box performance is prioritized by healthcare leaders, excellence paints a picture in a way that captures the distinction and meaning of achieving a top box score. That’s why excellence resides at the cornerstone of our work at PRC and why we continue to create and finetune healthcare intelligence solutions that prioritize it. We hope you find similar inspiration in excellence, with that inspiration serving as a guide to your organization providing optimal healthcare outcomes.

Read more about our excellence scale here, and contact us today to further discuss how we can help your organization visualize and achieve healthcare excellence.