One unit, twenty months. The ledger below registers each funded improvement program against the HCAHPS question it is meant to move, reads the score after the survey lag, and rolls the result up to the dollars the hospital has at stake. Numbers are modeled on the shape of a unit dashboard, not drawn from any hospital.
Year to date, discharges January to August 2026
Select a row to see its question on the chart
| Program | Owner | Started | Cost | Targets | Baseline top box | Latest (3-mo) | Target | Read |
|---|
Each point is the discharge month. A program that starts in March is first visible in the March discharges, whose surveys close roughly two months later. The marker sits where the signal can first appear, not where the program began.
Where each question lives, and what is funded there
Hospital Value-Based Purchasing, FY2026 rules
Arithmetic: base operating DRG × 2% is the withhold; a quarter of the Total Performance Score is HCAHPS; eight dimensions share it. Annual impact = base operating dollars × (factor − 1). Star rating, payer incentives, and volume effects are outside this box.
Sources for the rules: CMS FY2026 Hospital VBP Quick Reference Guide (2% withhold, four domains at 25%, eight HCAHPS dimensions); HANYS VBP 2026 Reference Guide (impact formula); CMS FY2026 IPPS Final Rule Table 16B (hospital factors). Program names, costs, scores, and n are illustrative.