Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality December 29, 2011 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

Section 401(a) of the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 (CHIPRA), Public Law 111-3, amended the Social Security Act (the Act) to enact section 1139A (42 U.S.C. 1320b- 9a). Section 1139A(b) charged the Department of Health and Human Services with improving pediatric health care quality measures. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is soliciting the submission of instruments or domains (for example, key concepts) measuring aspects of families' experience with the quality of inpatient medical and surgical hospital care from all researchers, vendors, hospitals, stakeholders, and other interested parties. The survey development team of Children's Hospital Boston Center of Excellence for Pediatric Quality Measurement (CEPQM), is one of the CHIPRA Pediatric Quality Measures Program (PQMP) Centers of Excellence, which were created pursuant to an interagency agreement between the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and AHRQ, and are funded through cooperative agreement awards with AHRQ. AHRQ is interested in instruments and items through which families of pediatric patients assess the care their child receives during the child's inpatient stay. The goal is to develop a standardized instrument for use in the public reporting of family experience of pediatric inpatient care. The team developing this survey intends to submit it to the CAHPS Consortium to request use of the CAHPS trademark. The survey will be developed in accordance with CAHPS Survey Design Principles and will develop implementation instructions based on those for CAHPS instruments (https://www.cahps.AHRQ.gov/About-CAHPS/Principles.aspx.) All CAHPS surveys are available to users free of charge and are published on the AHRQ Web site.