Under the Consumer Assessments of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) program, sponsored by the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, researchers have developed methods for scientific surveys of consumers in a variety of health care systems, including health plans, hospitals, physician groups, and nursing homes.
HCP researchers are part of the team for design, analysis, and reporting of surveys of Medicare beneficiaries evaluating the quality of care and services provided by Medicare Advantage (managed care or Part C) health plans, Medicare prescription drug plans (PDPs or Part D plans), and fee-for-service Medicare. Each year, the Medicare CAHPS team surveys hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries nationwide, asking detailed questions to assess the quality of the patients’ health plans and prescription drug plans. The resulting information is reported back to Medicare beneficiaries to inform their health care choices. In addition, the team uses the data to identify areas of better and worse quality in the Medicare system and their relationship to characteristics of the health care system, and fosters quality improvement.
In addition to methodological research on the survey itself, HCP researchers have studied relationships among dimensions of quality measured in the CAHPS survey and between those measures and both measures of clinical quality of care (HEDIS) and characteristics of the health plans. Other HCP-authored publications have reported findings on:
- individual-level determinants of member assessments of their experiences;
- comparisons between the experiences of and dimensions of quality for different subgroups of plan members (e.g., healthy vs. sick, enrollees vs. disenrollees);
- methods for combining multiple quality measures into more parsimonious public reports;
- the relative contributions of health plans and geographical variation to overall variations in quality;
- factors influencing beneficiary choice among health plans and between managed care and fee-for-service health plans.
In addition, HCP researchers have developed new statistical methodology useful to analyzing and reporting Medicare CAHPS results.
