By Healthcare Facilities Today

Hospitals recently have begun to focus more on privacy, noise control and acoustics. This concern goes beyond federal HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulations, which mandate that patient information be kept confidential. Another big reason is a new rule related to patient satisfaction that affects payments to hospitals, according to an article posted on FacilitiesNet.com.

In 2006, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented an ongoing national survey to measure consumer satisfaction with hospital stays. In 2010, the Affordable Care Act mandated that this survey be used as one of the measures to calculate value-based incentive payments made by CMS to acute-care hospitals. Not surprisingly, hospitals are addressing consumer complaints in efforts to improve their ratings, according to the article.

Acoustics is a category that patients are asked to rate in the CMS survey. According to Thomas Koenig, president, Dynasound, speech privacy is one of the top three issues for patients. Fullerton says that new hospitals are being "aggressive" in the area of acoustics and working to reduce "liveliness."

Read the article.