CMS added a Care Coordination composite measure to HCAHPS 2.0. Public reporting on Care Compare begins October 2026 — based on calendar year 2025 discharges. The baseline is being built right now.
Key dates: HCAHPS 2.0 survey launched January 2025. Care Coordination composite measure public reporting begins October 2026 on CMS Care Compare, based on CY 2025 discharge data. VBP scoring impact begins FY 2030.
The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey has measured patient experience since 2006. For most of that time, the core domains covered communication with nurses, communication with doctors, staff responsiveness, pain management, medication communication, discharge information, cleanliness and quietness of the hospital environment, and overall hospital rating.
In 2025, CMS implemented HCAHPS 2.0 — the most significant update to the survey instrument since national implementation. Among the changes: a new Care Coordination composite measure that captures how well hospital staff coordinate the patient's care journey across teams, transitions, and follow-up.
The Care Coordination domain asks patients to evaluate whether their care team communicated clearly about what to expect after discharge, whether they felt their care was coordinated across different providers and departments, and whether they received adequate follow-up support during the transition back home.
CMS will begin publicly reporting Care Coordination composite scores on Care Compare in October 2026. That public reporting will be based on full calendar year 2025 discharge data — meaning the performance window is already open.
Hospitals that are not actively managing their Care Coordination performance today are already building a baseline that will become public in less than 18 months. The hospitals that establish strong Care Coordination performance before October 2026 will hold a visible competitive position on Care Compare before the broader market fully understands what's at stake.
The performance data being collected right now — in 2025 — will determine how your hospital appears on Care Compare when public reporting begins in October 2026. There is no grace period. The clock is already running.
The Hospital Value-Based Purchasing program withholds 2% of every IPPS-participating hospital's Medicare base operating revenue annually. That pool is redistributed based on Total Performance Score (TPS) — a composite of clinical outcomes, patient safety, efficiency, and patient experience measures.
The patient experience component — currently weighted at 25–30% of TPS — is determined by HCAHPS survey results. As Care Coordination becomes a scored domain, hospitals with strong performance will see their patient experience composite improve, directly affecting their TPS and their share of the VBP redistribution pool.
CMS has indicated that Care Coordination will begin affecting VBP scoring in FY 2030, giving hospitals a window to build performance before financial consequences attach. But the public visibility on Care Compare begins in October 2026 — and that visibility affects patient choice, payer relationships, and referring physician decisions long before the VBP scoring impact arrives.
The HCAHPS 2.0 Care Coordination composite captures patient perceptions across several dimensions:
These measures directly reflect the post-discharge touchpoint experience — the D+3 and D+7 follow-up contacts that most hospitals either handle inconsistently through manual outreach or skip entirely due to staff capacity constraints.
Post-discharge follow-up is one of the most consistently under-resourced functions in hospital patient experience programs. The reasons are structural: discharge coordinators and case managers are already stretched across complex patient populations, and post-discharge outreach competes with active inpatient care for staff attention.
Manual post-discharge phone call programs have documented completion rates well below 50% in most hospital systems. Patient portal messaging has low engagement among the 65+ demographic that represents the majority of HCAHPS survey respondents. The result is that most hospitals have little systematic data on what their Care Coordination performance actually looks like — and no reliable mechanism to improve it at scale.
When Care Coordination scores go public on Care Compare in October 2026, hospitals that have been relying on manual outreach will be competing against hospitals that have automated the entire post-discharge touchpoint sequence. The performance gap will be visible to every patient, payer, and referring physician in their market.
Beritus integrates with hospital EHR systems via Redox middleware to automatically trigger patient communication at every HCAHPS-relevant clinical moment — including the post-discharge touchpoints that drive Care Coordination scores.
The Care Coordination coverage sequence works as follows:
Every touchpoint is triggered automatically by EHR events — no staff action required. Negative sentiment or safety keywords at any point in the sequence trigger an immediate escalation alert to the appropriate care team member. Everything else runs silently in the background.
The hospitals that will hold the strongest Care Coordination positions on Care Compare in October 2026 are the ones that deploy systematic post-discharge touchpoint coverage in 2025. The performance window is already open. The hospitals that act now will establish baselines that latecomers cannot close with six months of effort before public reporting begins.
Beritus deploys in 2–4 weeks via Redox middleware integration with your existing EHR. No new IT project. No staff training. No workflow changes for clinical staff. The Care Coordination sequence runs automatically from the moment a discharge order is placed.
Book a 20-minute demo. We pull your hospital's live CMS Care Compare data and show you exactly what your current Care Coordination baseline looks like — and what Beritus would change.
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