cNPS: Caregiver Net Promoter Score

A Proxy for Measuring Patient Satisfaction

Data is powerful, especially in the healthcare industry. It is extremely important that healthcare communities understand how they are performing, as this critical understanding can be a matter of life and death.

Feedback and data gathered from industry surveys, like HCAHPS, is invaluable. But not all facilities are required to, or choose to, use this extensive and expensive survey. Some healthcare organizations have integrated their own surveys, or use third-party vendors to gather data for a variety of performance metrics, including the Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS). The NPS questions patients directly on how likely they would be to recommend a healthcare facility to family and friends.

At Ceca Foundation, we have found that many surveys are missing something critical: They leave out employees and their perspectives from the front-row seats of our healthcare facilities. So we created the cNPS—or caregiver Net Promoter Score—to bridge that gap. Since the initial launch of the Ceca Award program, we have been asking the employees of our healthcare partners for their feedback on the patient experience.

cNPS Defined

The cNPS asks employees: If the need for care arises, how likely are you to recommend your healthcare organization to family and friends?

The cNPS gives an entirely different window into patient experiences by collecting caregiver insights, not about workplace culture, but about patient satisfaction.

How cNPS Data is Collected

Surveying for cNPS is extremely efficient, accurate, and cost effective. Additionally, we have found that cNPS is complementary with other patient satisfaction metrics, which makes it easy to collect the data from employees on a semi-annual basis through an online tool—at the same time they are surveyed on other metrics.

Employees are more keenly interested in the viability and reputation of their healthcare facility than most patients, and they know more than patients because they have daily and long-term, behind-the-curtain perspectives. Our experience is that the cNPS is a source of pride to employees who provide their feedback credibly, consistently, and accurately.

How cNPS Insight is Used

As a third-party nonprofit working with healthcare organizations, we have a unique view into employee perspectives across a wide variety of care communities, and the cNPS impact on patient experience. It can be profound.

The cNPS is one of many metrics Ceca uses to track partner performance on a wide array of engagement, retention, and quality of care objectives. However, the cNPS represents one of the most reliable, inexpensive, and often overlooked ways to gauge patient experience and set patient-centric goals for healthcare organizations. It’s a metric that healthcare executives should be paying attention to, if they aren’t already.

We’ve tracked performance data since our Ceca Award program launched in 2013. Notably, healthcare facilities that partner with us to implement the Ceca Award program have consistently increased their cNPS scores by 20%.

Ceca also uses caregivers as proxies to measure two other critical components of patient care – quality of care and patient safety. Taken together with patient satisfaction, these components form a “three-legged stool” that help Ceca and our healthcare partners form a more complete picture of the patient experience.

Read more about cNPS in a thought leadership piece that appeared in Modern Healthcare, authored by Ceca Co-Founder, Matthew Lawlor.

Net Promoter^®, NPS^®, NPS Prism^®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score℠ and Net Promoter System℠ are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.