CPHQ Cheat Sheet 2026

The 30 highest-yield CPHQ facts, distilled from real exam questions. Print it, save it as a PDF, or study it here — free, no sign-up.

1. Which national program financially rewards or penalizes hospitals based on quality performance metrics, including HCAHPS scores? → Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program
2. An occurrence report (incident report) is best used for: → Documenting events to support quality improvement and risk management
3. What is the primary goal of clinical risk management in a healthcare organization? → Identify, assess, and mitigate risks to patients, staff, and the organization
4. In the context of CPHQ principles, patient and family engagement is MOST strongly linked to improvements in: → Safety culture, patient experience scores, and care quality outcomes
5. Which of the following BEST measures the effectiveness of a patient and family engagement program? → Patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) and patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs)
6. A balanced scorecard is helpful because it → put strategy and vision at the center of an organization's effort.
7. Whose reputation as a quality guru is tied to the phrase "Trilogy"? → Juran
8. Which concept describes the degree to which patients are protected from unintended harm during care? → Patient safety
9. Which of the following best describes a 'near miss' in healthcare risk management? → An unsafe condition that did not reach the patient
10. A CPHQ professional identifies that a hospital's C. diff infection rate is in the 90th percentile nationally. This means the hospital's rate is: → Worse than 90% of hospitals
11. When assessing a patient's readiness to engage in self-management of a chronic condition, the quality professional should FIRST: → Assess the patient's current health literacy, activation level, and social support system
12. Donabedian's model of quality assessment evaluates healthcare quality through which three dimensions? → Structure, Process, Outcome
13. A physical therapist rates the intensity of the pain from 1 to 10. What kind of data is he or she gathering? → Ordinal
14. Which statistical technique is used to adjust quality measure data to account for differences in patient populations? → Risk adjustment
15. The 'teach-back' method is used in patient engagement primarily to: → Confirm patient comprehension of health information and instructions
16. Which of the following represents the 5S approach's initial step? → Seiri
17. A patient advocate's primary responsibility in a hospital setting is to: → Ensure patients understand their rights and facilitate access to care
18. Under the CMS Conditions of Participation, hospitals must inform patients of their rights: → Prior to or at the time of admission
19. A CPHQ professional reviewing a liability claim would focus most on which aspect? → Identifying systems failures contributing to the adverse event
20. A hospital wants to compare its surgical infection rate to similar-sized hospitals. This process is called: → Benchmarking
21. Which of the following is a primary principle of Lean methodology in healthcare? → Eliminating activities that do not add value from the patient's perspective.
22. In health data analytics, which of the following is an example of a 'process' measure? → The percentage of diabetic patients who received an annual foot exam.
23. Which of the following is a key strategy to engage patients from diverse cultural backgrounds in their care? → Using professional interpreter services and culturally adapted materials
24. What connection exists between root cause analysis and peer review? → They work together in failure analysis
25. A CPHQ professional is asked to identify which quality problem to address first. The best tool for prioritizing issues by frequency of occurrence is: → Pareto chart
26. Which of the following is an illustration of a external source of information? → Standards
27. Which of the following is an example of patient engagement at the ORGANIZATIONAL level? → Patients serving on the hospital's Board of Directors or quality improvement committees
28. The most effective method of assessing the success of performance development training is through → observed behavioral changes
29. A hospital's risk manager discovers that a surgical sponge was left in a patient post-operatively. This is classified as a: → Sentinel event
30. Which national database is commonly used by U.S. hospitals to benchmark inpatient quality measures? → CMS Hospital Compare