CBAHI patient satisfaction requirements: what accreditation and the MOH patient experience programme expect

They are easy to confuse, and they ask for different things:

	CBAHI accreditation	MOH Patient Experience Measurement Program
Who runs it	Saudi Central Board for Accreditation of Healthcare Institutions	Ministry of Health, with an independent third party administering the surveys
What it looks at	Whether the hospital runs the required processes: patient rights, education, complaints, quality management	How patients rate their experience, by facility and service, against a national standard
How it is assessed	On-site survey: documents, interviews with leadership, staff, patients and families	Surveys designed per visit type; periodic national reports and benchmarks
What the hospital controls	The processes and the evidence	The experience itself, every day, in every unit

The PXMP tells a hospital where it stands after the fact. CBAHI asks whether the hospital has a way of knowing and acting on its own. Continuous in-house measurement serves both.

Qmeter is not affiliated with CBAHI or the Ministry of Health and is not part of the PXMP.

The national hospital standards describe processes, not a survey format. The chapters that touch patient experience are:

• Patient and Family Rights: patients are informed of their rights and responsibilities, including how to raise a concern; the hospital has a process to receive and respond to complaints.
• Patient and Family Education: communication in a language the patient understands, which in the Kingdom means Arabic first and English alongside.
• Quality Management and Patient Safety: the hospital measures, analyses and improves; patient feedback is one of the inputs leadership reviews.

Read the standards and their measurable elements in the edition your hospital is surveyed against; this page describes the pattern, not the clause text.

The Ministry of Health describes the programme as a national transformation initiative that lets patients and families take part in quality improvement by measuring their satisfaction with surveys designed for each visit type. It covers hospitals, specialised centres, primary health care centres, blood banks, tobacco cessation and premarital screening centres, the 937 service centre and other visits, and is intended to extend to all MOH facilities. An independent third party administers the surveys and issues the reports so that results are comparable across facilities; outputs include a national standard for patient experience, comparison across facilities, regional and international benchmarking and the drivers of experience at facility and service level.

For a hospital this means two things: the national result arrives as a benchmark it cannot change retrospectively, and the drivers behind the score are visible only to a hospital that measures the same moments itself, every day.

The free tool above turns this list into a gap report you can e-mail to yourself.

1. Inform: patients know, in Arabic and English, how to give feedback and how to complain, at every unit.
2. Collect at the moment: one question at outpatient exit, pharmacy, laboratory, emergency and discharge; SMS the same day for those who leave quickly.
3. Record complaints as cases: owner, deadline, escalation, outcome, audit trail.
4. Analyse by unit and language: Arabic and English comments categorised; results by service, shift and period.
5. Act and minute it: findings and decisions in the quality committee record.
6. Protect the data: minimise, mask, retain under policy; keep it in the Kingdom if your policy requires.

A survey a patient cannot read is not evidence of anything. In Saudi hospitals the first screen should be Arabic with a one-tap switch to English and, where the patient population needs it, Urdu or other languages. Right-to-left layout, Arabic comments and Arabic reports are part of the set-up, not an afterthought. The bilingual kiosk and QR flow is described on the Arabic and English patient kiosk page and the language mechanics on multilingual surveys.

A surveyor who asks "show me how this complaint was handled" needs an answer in seconds. In Qmeter a low rating or a written complaint opens a case routed to the unit's owner with first-response and resolution deadlines; missed deadlines escalate; closing requires a root cause and an action; the patient can be informed by SMS. Every step is written to an audit trail. See closed-loop ticketing.

Hospitals whose policy or regulator requires patient data to stay in Saudi Arabia can run Qmeter on their own infrastructure with the full product: on-premise deployment. In the cloud, personal data in comments is masked by default, revealed only with an audited action and removed by retention rules; see security and privacy.

• Ministry of Health: Patient Experience Measurement Program (purpose, facilities covered, third-party administration, outputs).
• CBAHI National Hospital Standards, 3rd edition (effective 1 January 2016) (chapter list including Patient and Family Rights, Patient and Family Education, Quality Management and Patient Safety).
• Promoting patients' rights through hospital accreditation (peer-reviewed overview).