HRSA/MCHB 2005 FEDERAL/STATE PARTNERSHIP MEETING

PUBLIC HEALTH ACROSS THE LIFESPAN

CAHPS Title V Assessment

CHUCK DARBY: We are in the process of revising the health plan survey. Currently revising the survey that’s used by the National Committee for Quality Assurance, which has the, we are up to 4.0 in versions of the survey and in this case it has an H after it for HEDIS. But what this means for Medicaid programs is that we will also be revising the Core set of items making them, hopefully better and then also adding some supplemental items. In addition, we are developing a commission group survey, and the instrument has been drafted, we currently are trying it out in a number of different sites around the country and are doing some cognitive testing of the items as we go and have input from an ongoing advisory group that does include input from State Medicaid programs.

As I said, from your standpoint, the Core would be refined, we do not expect a lot of changes in the survey, in fact we finished the field test and some of the supplemental items that the NCQA has wished to add, probably that’s where the focus of most of the revision will be, those are some new items that need to be refined but the Core items except for a small number tested out very well because they have been very thoroughly tested in the past. So we don’t expect a lot of revisions to the Core set of items but there will be some refinement. And then, of course, there will be these items available at the clinician group level, probably a Core survey of somewhere, anywhere between 25 and 50 items for that. And then we are doing some refinement of the supplemental items that we have.

I think we have covered a good part of this. I think because of the fact that fairly minor changes are being made, we’ll still be able to do any kind of trending and then there will still be a Core that allows us to do the kind of benchmarking that we want to do.

Here’s a timeline for the Medicaid version of the survey. We expect to have all the work done on the health plan survey and submitted for NCQA approval in January, and then we’ll make any other modifications that we need to make in the Medicaid version and then also in others.

We have a User group meeting; it has been almost every year. This will be our tenth one coming up. It will be in Baltimore on the Harbor and it’s an opportunity for people to come and tell us what’s wrong with the survey and tell us what we can do better and also tell us what’s working well so that we know that we get some feedback from that. It also gives you an opportunity if you choose to come to the meeting to get some of the latest of what we are doing. You may have interest in some of the other surveys that we’re working on. We expect that the hospital survey by March, by the time this meeting is held, we’ll have been fully approved and we’ll start to be implemented so that there’ll be some, quite a bit of focus on that. But, it’s a three day meeting all told, the first day is devoted to a sort of CAHPS 101 it provides more detail than Carla and I have been able to do today about the development, what our approach has been, what the uses have been and then the following days are a lot of detail. We have always had excellent participation by the States, it’s been sort of the backbone of the group of participants that we had and we’re expanding now but at the same time we certainly hope that you can come and learn from what we have and also give us an opportunity to learn from you.

Contact information for Carla and myself and also the CAHPS User Network, the response line that is here Westat has with the CAHPS User Network tries to respond within 24 hours and I think they have a fairly good record in doing that. I’m always available if you have a question; please contact me as well as Carla.

And I think that’s it.