What Is Press Ganey? Surveys, Scores, and What Changes Under Qualtrics in 2027

What is Press Ganey?#

Press Ganey is a healthcare experience measurement company that administers federally standardized patient surveys such as HCAHPS as a CMS-approved vendor, runs its own proprietary patient experience surveys, and benchmarks hospital and clinic results against a national comparative database. Founded in 1985 by University of Notre Dame professors Irwin Press and Rod Ganey, it has been part of Qualtrics since the Press Ganey Forsta acquisition closed on May 18, 2026.

For most US hospital patient experience teams, Press Ganey is where the scores come from. CMSWire reports that the company serves more than 41,000 healthcare facilities, including the majority of US hospitals. This guide is for patient experience, nursing and quality leaders who need to read Press Ganey scores correctly, explain them to a board, and go into a 2027 renewal with a new owner on the other side of the table. It covers how the Press Ganey survey works, how scores are calculated, what patients are asked, what the Qualtrics deal does and doesn't change, and the one question no score answers: why the number moved.

Key takeaways

• Press Ganey does two different jobs. It administers HCAHPS and other CAHPS surveys under CMS rules it cannot change, and it sells proprietary surveys, analytics and benchmarks that it fully controls.
• Press Ganey scores come in three forms: top-box percentage, mean score on a 0–100 scale, and percentile rank. The same responses can rank a unit differently depending on which one you read.
• The updated HCAHPS survey (January 2025 discharges onward) has 32 items, three web-first modes, a 49-day response window, and three new measures: Care Coordination, Restfulness of Hospital Environment, and Information about Symptoms. Care Compare began reporting the new measures with its October 2026 refresh.
• Qualtrics now owns Press Ganey. The ownership change leaves HCAHPS rules alone, but contract terms, platforms, benchmarks and data access can all move, so 2027 renewals need written answers.
• Nationally, only 23% of sampled patients answered HCAHPS for October 2024–September 2025 discharges, and no official item asks them why. Conversational follow-up interviews fill that gap alongside HCAHPS, not instead of it.

What does a Press Ganey survey measure?#

A Press Ganey survey measures how patients experienced specific parts of their care: communication with nurses and doctors, staff responsiveness, medicines, the hospital environment, discharge preparation, and an overall rating. It does this through one of two instrument families. The first is the federally standardized CAHPS family, led by HCAHPS. The second is Press Ganey's own proprietary surveys. Most confusion about "Press Ganey scores" comes from mixing the two.

HCAHPS and other CAHPS surveys#

HCAHPS (the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey) is the national, standardized survey of adult inpatients that Press Ganey administers for hospitals under CMS rules. CMS implemented HCAHPS in October 2006 and first publicly reported results in March 2008. Since July 2007, hospitals paid under the Inpatient Prospective Payment System have had to collect and submit HCAHPS data to receive their full annual payment update, according to CMS's HCAHPS overview. HCAHPS results also feed the Person and Community Engagement domain of the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing program, which is why HCAHPS scores come up in finance meetings as well as quality committees.

Hospitals can self-administer HCAHPS if CMS approves them, but most hire a vendor, and Press Ganey Associates is on the HCAHPS approved survey vendor list. On HCAHPS, Press Ganey cannot change the questions, wording, order, modes or timing. What it provides is compliant administration, sampling, data submission to CMS, and the analytics on top. The same applies to the other CAHPS-family surveys Press Ganey offers, such as OAS CAHPS for outpatient and ambulatory surgery, Home Health CAHPS, the CAHPS Hospice Survey, and CG-CAHPS for clinician groups.

Press Ganey's proprietary patient experience surveys#

Press Ganey's proprietary surveys are questionnaires the company designs and owns for settings and topics the CAHPS instruments don't cover, such as medical practice visits, emergency departments and specific service lines. They typically use a five-point scale from "very poor" to "very good," and most include open comment fields. The Press Ganey Outpatient Medical Practice Survey, for example, has 24 items across six scales: Access, Moving Through the Visit, Nurse/Assistant, Care Provider, Personal Issues and Overall Assessment. That structure is documented in a 2017 psychometric study in Health and Quality of Life Outcomes.

Hospitals can also add up to 12 supplemental questions after the official HCAHPS items, a cap that took effect with January 2025 discharges. A lot of what clinicians call "the Press Ganey survey" is really HCAHPS followed by a block of Press Ganey supplemental items the hospital picked.

How and when patients receive a Press Ganey survey#

HCAHPS goes to a random monthly sample of adult inpatients across all conditions, not only Medicare patients. First contact must happen between 48 hours and 42 days after discharge, and patients then have 49 calendar days to respond. CMS approves six modes: Mail Only, Phone Only, Mail-Phone, and three web-first modes (Web-Mail, Web-Phone and Web-Mail-Phone) that start with an email invitation. Proprietary surveys run on whatever schedule the hospital and Press Ganey agree, often an email or text within a few days of a visit.

HCAHPS survey changes heading into 2027#

The updated HCAHPS survey, which applies to patients discharged on or after January 1, 2025, is the biggest change to the instrument since public reporting began. The table summarizes the changes in CMS's updated HCAHPS survey materials and the accompanying crosswalks.

Several 2026 habits go away with these changes: the Care Transition measure, the call-button question, the patient-only response rule, and the assumption that the survey arrives by mail or phone. Care Compare began publicly reporting the new sub-measures with its October 2026 refresh, so we expect 2027 to be the first full year boards see Care Coordination, Restfulness, and Information about Symptoms on public scorecards. Value-based payment moves more slowly. CMS's crosswalk maps the updated survey to six Hospital Value-Based Purchasing dimensions for fiscal years 2027 through 2029: communication with nurses, communication with doctors, cleanliness and quietness, communication about medicines, discharge information, and overall rating. Care Coordination, Restfulness of Hospital Environment and Responsiveness of Hospital Staff join the crosswalk in FY 2030.

How are Press Ganey scores calculated?#

Press Ganey scores are calculated in three ways: as a top-box percentage, as a mean score on a 0–100 scale, or as a percentile rank against a comparison database. The same patient responses can tell different stories depending on which one your dashboard leads with, so the first step in reading Press Ganey scores is knowing which metric you're looking at.

Top-box score#

A top-box score is the percentage of responses in the most favorable answer category. For HCAHPS that means "Always" on frequency questions, "Yes, definitely" on the three-option care questions, 9 or 10 on the 0–10 hospital rating, and "Definitely yes" on willingness to recommend. CMS publishes HCAHPS as top-box, middle-box and bottom-box percentages on Care Compare. Before publishing, it adjusts for survey mode and patient mix so that hospitals with different populations can be compared fairly.

Mean score#

A mean score converts each response to a value from 0 to 100 and averages them. On Press Ganey's five-point proprietary items, "very poor" equals 0, "poor" 25, "fair" 50, "good" 75 and "very good" 100. HCAHPS frequency items convert linearly the same way: "Never" is 0, "Sometimes" 33.3, "Usually" 66.7 and "Always" 100. CMS uses these linear mean scores, not top-box percentages, to build HCAHPS Star Ratings.

Percentile rank#

A percentile rank is the share of organizations in the comparison group that scored below you, so a unit at the 70th percentile outscored 70% of its peers. Press Ganey calculates percentiles against its comparative database or a peer group you choose, and this is the number most executive scorecards and incentive plans use. Because percentiles are relative, your raw score can rise while your percentile falls if peers improved faster.

Worked example: one question, two units, three readings#

Two units that deliver similar care can swap places depending on the metric. In the illustrative example below, both units have 200 responses to "During this hospital stay, how often did nurses listen carefully to you?"

By top-box, Unit A is better. By mean and bottom-box, Unit B is better: fewer of its patients had a bad experience, and fewer had a perfect one. Neither metric is wrong, because they answer different questions. Before a unit gets praised or put on an action plan, confirm which metric its target uses.

Percentiles magnify small differences. Angela Presson and colleagues studied 34,503 respondents seen by 624 providers at the University of Utah and found that individual Press Ganey items hit the maximum possible score 55.4% to 84.1% of the time. With so many scores bunched at the ceiling, losing half a point of raw score could drop a provider from the 100th percentile to about the 70.7th. Providers with at least one perfect-score quarter saw quarterly percentile swings 3.3 to 3.7 times larger than other providers did.

National HCAHPS scores for comparison#

National HCAHPS scores are the benchmark underneath Press Ganey's percentiles. The July 2026 HCAHPS public report covers October 2024 to September 2025 discharges at 3,949 hospitals and shows these national top-box averages:

Nationally, the weakest measures are quietness at 60% and communication about medicines at 62%, so that is where most hospitals have the most room to improve. State response rates ranged from 16% in the District of Columbia to 34% in North Dakota.

Press Ganey survey questions: what patients are actually asked#

Press Ganey survey questions start with the official HCAHPS items, which every hospital asks word for word, followed by any proprietary or supplemental items the hospital chooses. The 32-item updated HCAHPS survey groups its care questions into the measures below, paraphrased from the official CMS survey instruments.

The rest of the instrument is screener and "About You" items: whether the stay was planned, overall physical and mental health, education, language, ethnicity and race. CMS uses these for patient-mix adjustment. The official instruments come in nine languages (English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Portuguese, German, Tagalog and Arabic). None of the official items is open-ended. For a 40-question bank you can use outside the regulated instrument, see Patient Satisfaction Survey Questions for 2027.

Qualtrics Press Ganey: what the acquisition changes for clients in 2027#

The Qualtrics Press Ganey acquisition changes who owns your patient experience vendor, not the federal rules that govern HCAHPS. The practical 2027 decisions are about renewal timing, platform consolidation and data portability. Treat the facts and the open questions separately.

What is confirmed about Qualtrics and Press Ganey#

These facts are confirmed as of late 2026:

• Timeline. Qualtrics announced the Press Ganey Forsta acquisition on October 6, 2025, and closed it on May 18, 2026. Press Ganey Forsta had bought InMoment in 2025, extending its reach into financial services, retail and hospitality, per CMSWire. Qualtrics describes the combined data as the "world's largest healthcare experience dataset."
• Restructuring. About three months after the close, Qualtrics notified 117 Seattle employees on August 19, 2026, that their jobs would end on October 18, according to a WARN filing reported by KIRO 7. GeekWire reported cuts in Utah and overseas as well.
• HCAHPS vendor status. Press Ganey Associates remained on CMS's HCAHPS approved vendor list as of September 8, 2026.
• Market impact. Forrester analysts wrote that the deal shakes up multiple markets, since Press Ganey, Forsta and Qualtrics used to compete for some of the same buyers. Our breakdown of which VoC vendors are still independent after Press Ganey Forsta maps what is left.

Nothing public commits Qualtrics to a specific product roadmap for Press Ganey clients, and this guide doesn't guess at one. What Qualtrics' own AI features do today is covered in Qualtrics AI in 2027.

Questions to ask Press Ganey before your 2027 renewal#

The questions to ask before a 2027 renewal are the ones whose answers could change under new ownership, and you want each answer in writing:

1. Contract and renewal timing. Which legal entity holds our contract, does an assignment clause apply, and when does our auto-renewal notice window close?
2. HCAHPS continuity. Will HCAHPS and our other CAHPS surveys keep running under the same approved-vendor entity, with no change to data submission?
3. Platform consolidation. Will our dashboards, reporting or survey platform move to a different system during our term? If so, when, and what happens to historical trend lines and saved reports?
4. Benchmarks. Will the comparative database, peer groups or percentile method change, and will historical percentiles be restated?
5. Data portability. Can we export response-level data (scores, comments, survey dates, unit and provider attribution) in a documented format, and at what cost? The issues are similar to those covered in Getting Your Data Out of Qualtrics.
6. PHI handling. Does our business associate agreement change, and which entities and subprocessors will handle protected health information?
7. Bundling and price. Will renewal pricing depend on adopting other products in the group?
8. Team continuity. Who will our account and analytics contacts be after the restructuring?

For negotiation tactics, see Before You Renew Qualtrics: The Negotiation Levers Buyers Actually Have. For a fuller evaluation, use the CX platform RFP question set.

What we expect in 2027#

These are projections, not reported facts. They are based on the 2025–2026 evidence above:

• More formal vendor reviews at renewal. We expect more health systems to run structured reviews instead of auto-renewing. Ownership has changed, restructuring followed within three months, and buyers now have questions about benchmarks and platforms that didn't exist in 2025.
• A split between the regulatory and insight layers. Because HCAHPS must stay with an approved vendor, we expect more teams to keep a vendor for HCAHPS and evaluate the analytics and qualitative layer separately. That pattern is already showing up in Qualtrics alternatives for healthcare and patient experience.
• Noisier trend lines. As more hospitals adopt web-first modes, internal trend lines may shift. CMS adjusts public scores for mode, but your unit dashboards may not.

What Press Ganey scores can't tell you#

Press Ganey scores tell you that a measure moved, for a minority of patients, weeks to months after the care happened. They don't tell you why it moved or what to change. That isn't a flaw in Press Ganey specifically. Standardized surveys are built to compare hospitals, not to explain them. Five limits matter most:

• Who answers. The national HCAHPS response rate was 23% for October 2024–September 2025 discharges, so about three in four sampled patients never reply. Patients who do respond may differ from those who don't.
• When you find out. Contact happens 48 hours to 42 days after discharge, followed by a 49-day response window. Care Compare's July 2026 report covered discharges from October 2024 through September 2025, so its newest data was about ten months old when published. Press Ganey's own dashboards are faster, but still run weeks behind the care.
• Why it happened. The official HCAHPS instrument has no open-ended item. A "Sometimes" on "Did staff work well together?" doesn't say which handoff failed, on which shift, or what the patient needed. Comment boxes on proprietary surveys help, but they usually produce short fragments.
• Ceiling effects. With most item scores at the maximum, small raw changes cause large percentile swings, as the Presson study shows.
• Language. The official instrument comes in nine languages. Patients who prefer another language are underrepresented or answer in a second language.

Patient Experience in 2026: Moving Beyond HCAHPS and Static Surveys covers this gap in more depth.

How to get the why behind HCAHPS scores and Press Ganey results#

The way to get the why behind HCAHPS scores is to run short conversational follow-up interviews alongside your Press Ganey program, aimed at the specific measure that moved. This supplements HCAHPS and does not replace it: HCAHPS is mandatory for hospitals that want their full Medicare payment update. Perspective AI is not an approved HCAHPS vendor and doesn't submit data to CMS. Its job is to explain the scores, not to produce them.

Step 1: Pick one measure and one population#

Start with one measure that moved and one population. For example: Care Coordination top-box fell six points on 4 West in Q3. A narrow scope gives you a sharp question and a result someone owns.

Step 2: Write one research question, not a questionnaire#

Frame a single question, such as "What made patients on 4 West feel their care team wasn't on the same page?" Let the interviewer handle follow-ups instead of scripting 20 items. The patient experience interview template gives you a starting structure.

Step 3: Keep clear of HCAHPS rules#

Agree on timing and population with your compliance lead and your HCAHPS vendor before contacting patients. CMS's HCAHPS Quality Assurance Guidelines bar HCAHPS-like surveys during the stay or at discharge. They also discourage HCAHPS-style answer categories such as "Always/Usually/Sometimes/Never" in your own questions, and they prohibit anything that changes a patient's chance of being sampled. Open-ended conversation is a different instrument by design, but the timing still needs sign-off.

Step 4: Let an AI interviewer follow up#

An AI interviewer agent talks with each patient by text or voice, asks the main question, and probes vague answers. If a patient says "nobody seemed to talk to each other," the interviewer asks for the moment it happened and what they needed instead. Perspective AI runs these conversations in 57 languages with auto-detect and accent-native voices. In voice mode the first word lands in about a second, and patients can interrupt mid-sentence, much like a phone call with a staff member.

Step 5: Read themes and quotes next to the score#

Automatic analysis groups the conversations into themes, Magic Summary reports pull them together, and quote extraction surfaces the lines worth reading aloud at a unit huddle. Put the quotes next to the Press Ganey trend line, and the score finally has a cause attached. For closed-loop recovery on individual complaints, add a service recovery survey. For deeper co-design sessions, run a patient focus group. Teams working in Claude or another AI assistant can also query conversations and launch follow-ups through the Perspective MCP.

Step 6: Recheck the next quarter#

Make one change based on what patients said, then watch the same measure in the next quarter's Press Ganey scores. Hospitality teams run the same loop on post-stay surveys. The 90-day plan in the Hotel Leader's Guide to AI Guest Experience maps closely onto a patient experience pilot. For a wider view of tools in this category, see Best Patient Experience Software in 2026, or explore how CX teams use conversational research.

Frequently Asked Questions#

What is a Press Ganey survey?#

A Press Ganey survey is a patient experience questionnaire administered by Press Ganey, either the CMS-standardized HCAHPS or another CAHPS survey, or one of Press Ganey's proprietary surveys. Hospitals use HCAHPS to meet Medicare reporting requirements. Proprietary surveys cover settings like medical practices and emergency departments. Patients usually receive the survey by mail, phone or email within weeks of discharge or a visit.

Is Press Ganey the same as HCAHPS?#

Press Ganey is not the same as HCAHPS. HCAHPS is the federal survey that CMS designs and controls, while Press Ganey is one of the approved vendors that administers it for hospitals. Press Ganey also runs its own proprietary surveys and benchmarking, which is why "Press Ganey scores" can refer to either HCAHPS results or proprietary measures.

How are Press Ganey scores calculated?#

Press Ganey scores are calculated as top-box percentages, mean scores or percentile ranks. Top-box is the share of most-favorable answers, such as "Always." Mean scores convert answers to a 0–100 scale and average them. Percentile ranks compare your score with other organizations in Press Ganey's database. Check which metric a target uses, because the same responses can rank units differently.

What is a good Press Ganey score?#

A good Press Ganey score is one that sits above your chosen peer group's percentile target and is improving over time. No single number is universal. For context, national HCAHPS top-box averages for October 2024–September 2025 discharges were 80% for nurse communication, 72% for a 9–10 hospital rating, and 71% for "definitely recommend."

Did Qualtrics buy Press Ganey?#

Qualtrics bought Press Ganey through its acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta, which was announced on October 6, 2025, and completed on May 18, 2026. Press Ganey Associates remains a CMS-approved HCAHPS vendor. Clients should confirm contract, platform, benchmark and data-export terms in writing before 2027 renewals, since those can change under new ownership.

Can hospitals replace Press Ganey with AI interviews?#

Hospitals cannot replace HCAHPS administration with AI interviews, because CMS requires HCAHPS to be run by an approved vendor or an approved self-administering hospital. AI interviews work as a supplement. Tools like Perspective AI run conversational follow-ups that explain why a Press Ganey score moved, in the patient's own words and language, while the regulated survey continues unchanged.

Conclusion: Reading Press Ganey scores in 2027#

Press Ganey is two things at once: the regulated HCAHPS pipeline most US hospitals depend on, and a proprietary survey and benchmarking business that is now part of Qualtrics. Reading Press Ganey scores well in 2027 means knowing whether you're looking at top-box, mean or percentile. It means tracking the new Care Coordination, Restfulness, and Information about Symptoms measures now on Care Compare, and getting written answers on contract, platform, benchmark and data-export terms before you renew.

The score will still tell you what moved, not why. Keep HCAHPS running, and add a conversational layer that asks the patients behind the number what happened. Start a patient experience interview on the measure that slipped last quarter, or adapt the patient experience interview template. Perspective AI will help you bring the why to your next Press Ganey review.