Analyzing CAHPS Survey Data
Users of CAHPS surveys may take a few different approaches to analyzing their data to generate results that can be reported to health care providers, administrators, and consumers. The CAHPS Team supports users in conducting that analysis by developing and releasing the CAHPS Analysis Programs in SAS.
First Step: Get Data Ready for Analysis
Consult Preparing Data from CAHPS Surveys for Analysis (PDF, 369 KB) to learn:
- How to transform the raw data from the CAHPS surveys into data that can be analyzed using either the CAHPS Analysis Program in SAS or other statistical software.
- How to compute frequencies, top box scores, and other proportional scores (e.g., % Always, % Usually, and % Never and Sometimes).
CAHPS Analysis Program in SAS
The CAHPS Analysis Program—often referred to as the CAHPS macro—is a free program written for SAS (version 6.0 or later) that enables survey users to conduct the analyses needed to produce valid comparisons of performance across similar health care organizations. The CAHPS macro:
- Adjusts the data for case mix.
- Generates a distribution of survey results for each of the measures.
- Calculates the average score (the mean across all response categories) for both individual survey items and composite measures.
- Indicates whether an entity’s scores are statistically different from the average.
AHRQ’s CAHPS Consortium developed the CAHPS Analysis Program to work with all CAHPS surveys. It is updated periodically to add functionality, produce additional types of output, and correct or debug issues with previous versions.
Current version: 5.0
Requirements: Base SAS and the SAS/STAT module.
Download files:
- CAHPS Analysis Program with test modules (ZIP, 68 KB)—updated June 2020
- Instructions for Analyzing Data from CAHPS Surveys (PDF, 965.5 KB)—updated August 2020
