How PRC Compares to Press Ganey, NRC Health, and Qualtrics
Every CMS-approved vendor can field a compliant HCAHPS survey. The differences that matter show up after the data is collected: how many of your patients answered, whether the sample supports a reliable read at the unit level, how quickly a service failure reaches someone who can act on it, and how much interpretation comes with the file.
Healthcare leaders evaluating a change from a larger vendor commonly describe the same friction: consulting support that arrives only when asked, account manager turnover, platforms built for scale rather than for their organization, reporting that requires an analyst to interpret, and the sense of being one account among thousands.
This page states PRC’s methodology and results plainly, names the public sources for each figure, and lists the questions worth asking any vendor, PRC included.
A dedicated consultant, included
Every PRC client works with a named consultant who knows the organization, its history, and its data. Not a tier, not an hourly line item, not a rotating assignment.
Clients describe this as the difference between a vendor and an extension of the team.
Response rates, measured against the right benchmark
CMS approves six HCAHPS administration modes: Mail Only, Phone Only, Mail-Phone, Web-Mail, Web-Phone, and Web-Mail-Phone. Mode is the largest controllable driver of how many of your patients respond, so any response rate comparison has to hold mode constant.
PRC’s telephone-only clients averaged a 34% HCAHPS response rate
Against the CMS-published benchmarks for hospitals using telephone only, from the HCAHPS Response Rate by Survey Mode table covering July 2022 through June 2023 discharges:
| Telephone Only | Response Rate |
| National average | 27% |
| 50th precentile | 26% |
| 75th percentile | 34% |
| 90th percentile | 39% |
PRC’s telephone-only average sits at the 75th percentile nationally, 7 points above the telephone-only average. It also exceeds the 32% national average for mixed mode, the highest-performing mode category CMS reports.
Why mode matters before any vendor comparison.
CMS data for the same period shows telephone only averaging 27% against mail only at 22%. A 2025 randomized experiment across 51 nationally representative hospitals and 10,099 patients, published in Medical Care, found that mixed mode with telephone follow-up produced response rates 21.9 percentage points higher than mail only. Live voice contact reaches patients that mail and web do not.
The same study found that adding 27 supplemental items reduced response rates by 5.6 percentage points in mixed mode. Survey length has a real cost. A vendor loading your instrument with supplemental content is spending your response rate.
Every PRC call is placed by a PRC interviewer. The call center is in-house with nothing subcontracted, staffed by interviewers trained by PRC’s own training team and monitored by an in-house quality assurance team. For CAHPS programs, PRC follows the CMS protocol exactly, including the prescribed number of call attempts and the required calling windows. For non-regulated surveys, where CMS does not dictate the design, PRC builds each program around the client’s patient population, adjusting mode, language, and calling approach, and applies AI to surface themes and sentiment across open-ended responses. When a client’s population calls for it, PRC recruits and trains a dedicated team that operates as an extension of that organization.
What a higher response rate actually buys you
Worth stating precisely, because this is where vendor marketing tends to overreach.
It does not raise your scores. Hospitals with higher response rates do tend to show higher dimension scores in publicly reported data (Patient Experience Journal, 2019). But a 2025 randomized experiment tested the causal question directly and found that reducing response rate within a hospital does not change standard adjusted HCAHPS scores. CMS also adjusts for survey mode and patient mix specifically to remove any advantage attributable to how a survey was administered.
Any vendor telling you a higher response rate will lift your HCAHPS scores is making a claim the best available evidence does not support.
What it does buy, and this is what affects your operations:
- Star rating eligibility. CMS publicly reports HCAHPS measure scores for hospitals with at least 25 completed surveys across four quarters. HCAHPS Star Ratings require at least 100. Below 100, your scores publish but you receive no star rating.
- A score you can trust. More completes mean tighter confidence intervals. A top-box score built on 40 responses moves several points on random variation alone. Leaders who chase that movement chase noise.
- Visibility below the enterprise. A house-level score that clears the CMS minimum often cannot support a floor-level or clinic-level read. Sample size is what makes the data usable by the people who deliver the care.
- Who your data speaks for. Telephone follow-up reaches patients who do not answer mail or web surveys, including populations underrepresented in mail-only samples.
- Comments to act on. Verbatim comments drive service recovery and coaching. More completes mean more comments.
Underserved Populations
Mode determines who ends up in your data. Telephone reaches patients that mail and web do not, and the gap falls hardest on the populations health systems are most often trying to hear from. An analysis of 2022 Medicare CAHPS responses from 1,092,434 enrollees found telephone accounted for 2.3% of responses overall, but 16.5% among enrollees under 65 who qualify through disability, 16.1% among Black respondents, 14.6% among dual-eligible and low-income enrollees, and 14.1% among Hispanic respondents. Those are the voices that leave the sample first when a program moves to mail or web alone. A survey that underrepresents them does not only produce a less reliable score. It produces a score that describes a different population than the one the hospital actually serves.
Action planning is included, not an upsell
Collecting the data is the straightforward part. Knowing what to do with it is where most organizations stall.
PRC includes action planning support in the engagement rather than pricing it as a separate consulting line.
Post-discharge outreach by live callers
PRC’s Emera™ program reaches discharged patients by live human call within 24 to 48 hours, with multilingual support and defined clinical escalation pathways.
This matters for care transitions, readmission reduction, and the CMS Information Transfer PRO-PM. It also feeds directly back into experience measurement rather than sitting in a separate system.
Healthcare-exclusive benchmarks since 1980
PRC has worked in healthcare and nothing else since 1980. Benchmarks are built from healthcare organizations rather than filtered out of cross-industry data.
Where PRC fits, and where it does not
PRC is likely a strong fit if you:
- Want a consultant who carries knowledge of your organization year over year
- Are working on HCAHPS improvement or CMS Star Ratings and need reliable unit-level data
- Want action planning support included rather than quoted separately
- Are a mid-to-large healthcare organization that values a working relationship over a platform
- Have felt underserved by a larger vendor
Consider another vendor if you:
- Want a self-serve platform with minimal human involvement
- Need survey administration and reporting only, with no advisory layer
- Are buying primarily to satisfy compliance documentation
Questions worth asking any patient experience vendor
Ask PRC these too. A vendor that will not answer them in writing is telling you something.
- Which CAHPS programs are you CMS-approved to administer, and since when? The approved vendor list is public. Verify the answer against it.
- What response rate does your recommended mode produce in your book of business? Ask for the discharge period and the number of hospitals in the average.
- How does that compare with the CMS-published response rate for the same mode? CMS publishes response rate by mode with percentile breaks. A comparison against a different mode is not a comparison.
- Is telephone follow-up performed by your own interviewers or subcontracted? Ask about call attempts, the calling window, and languages supported.
- How many completed surveys will we get per quarter, by unit? Will that clear 100 for star rating eligibility?
- What is the actual elapsed time from survey completion to a service recovery alert reaching a unit leader? Ask for a number, not an adjective.
- What supplemental items are you proposing, and what will they cost us in response rate?
- What is included in the base fee, and what is billed separately? Coaching, custom analysis, additional reporting seats, ad hoc research.
- Who interprets CMS rule changes for us, and what happens when the instrument changes mid-contract?
- Can you substantiate every outcome figure in your marketing with a denominator, a time period, and a comparison group? Ask this one first.
Where HCAHPS is heading
The updated HCAHPS survey applies to patients discharged on or after January 1, 2025, with a web-first mode now available and web-first mode adjustments beginning with January 2025 discharges. Updated measures begin public reporting with the October 2026 Care Compare refresh and feed Hospital Value-Based Purchasing dimensions from FY 2027, with further changes from FY 2030.
Sources
- CMS, HCAHPS Response Rate by Survey Mode, July 2022 to June 2023 discharges.
- CMS, HCAHPS Fact Sheet, December 2024.
- CMS, Technical Notes for HCAHPS Star Ratings, July 2025.
- CMS, Updated HCAHPS Survey.
- CMS, HCAHPS Approved Vendor List.
- Beckett MK, Hambarsoomian K, Brown JA, Cleary PD, Abel GA, Giordano LA, Elliott MN. Supplemental Items Reduce HCAHPS Response Rates, but Response Rates Do Not Affect HCAHPS Scores: A Randomized Experiment.
- The impact of response rate on HCAHPS dimension scores. Patient Experience Journal, April 2019.
- Haas A, Quigley DD, Haviland AM, et al. Telephone Follow-Up on Medicare Patient Surveys Remains Critical. The American Journal of Managed Care.