Does Naming the Focal Plan in a CAHPS Survey of Health Care Quality Affect Response Rates and Beneficiary Evaluations?

Abstract

The recently enacted Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act makes collecting information on patients' health care experiences a national priority. The Medicare Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) Survey is the largest survey of Medicare beneficiaries about their care experiences. Each year, a nationally representative random sample of beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans receive a mail survey, followed by a telephone followup of nonrespondents. The mail survey lists the respondent's plan name at the beginning and repeats the plan name in several of the questions. However, some beneficiaries may not recognize their plan name, potentially affecting their level of engagement with the survey and, in turn, unit and item response rates. An alternative approach is to use a generic

Older Adults Rate Their Mental Health Better than Their General Health

“…Additional, detailed information about survey methods, composition of the cohort, and nonresponse patterns have been published elsewhere. 14-18 13.7% of the MA recipients were younger than age 65, based on disability status. We included them in the analyses because we could not assume that either disability status or age would influence the relationships in question.…”

Implications of Variation in the Relationships between Beneficiary Characteristics and Medicare Advantage CAHPS Measures

“…Response rates averaged 49 percent, for a total of 1,025,666 valid responses. Further details of survey methods, nonresponse patterns, measure correlations, and organizational and geographical variation in scores appear elsewhere (Goldstein et al 2001;Zaslavsky, Zaborski, and Cleary 2004;Elliott et al 2011;Farley et al 2011;Dembosky et al 2013;Hays et al 2014). We excluded 129,450 responses from beneficiaries younger than 65 years; disability qualifies this younger…”