AHCA Finalizes Rules Requiring Patient Safety Culture Surveys

1/26/2023 8:56:35 PM

The Agency for Health Care Administration has finalized 59A-35.115 : Patient Safety Surveys and supporting documents for hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers to conduct and submit Patient Safety Culture Survey data. The effective date for the rule is Thursday, January 26, 2023. This means that hospitals and ASCs have two years from the effective date to conduct the AHCA patient safety culture survey and submit the data in the format required by the law to AHCA.

After several years of proposed legislation, the law was passed in 2020 requiring hospitals and ASCs to conduct patient safety surveys every two years and submit the detailed results to AHCA for public reporting. Directing the Agency to use the questions developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) plus additional questions regarding staff’s likeliness to use the facility, the Agency has developed a data guide and data entry tool for submission (those can be found at the link above). 

FHA has submitted comments and recommendations for the three rounds of proposed rules, most recently in November 2022. While AHCA made some changes based on our comments, we are disappointed they did not

• better define “staff” who must be surveyed,
• modified the data submission tool to remove the column for comments,
• validate the wording on the additional questions required by the law, and
provide a Spanish version of the survey instrument.

FHA will be scheduling a call in the next couple of weeks to review the new requirements.