Using CAHPS to Examine Health Equity in Patient Experience: CMS Applications

CAHPS surveys ask patients to report on their experiences with a range of healthcare services at multiple levels of the delivery system. CAHPS surveys are administered in a variety of settings and by a variety of entities, including by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as part of their public reporting and reimbursement programs. This presentation will discuss findings, survey methods, and reporting strategies for CAHPS survey data in CMS applications that are intended to advance healthcare equity by broadening participation in patient experience surveys and by identifying and highlighting disparities in patient experience.

Marc Elliott is a senior principal researcher at RAND and holds its Distinguished Chair in Statistics. His areas of interest include health equity, quality measurement, Medicare, underserved populations, healthcare experiences, survey sampling, experimental design, causal inference, and case-mix adjustment in U.S. and UK applications. He has developed Bayesian methods of estimating race/ethnicity and associated disparities using surname and address information. Elliott led the Office of Minority Health work developing novel, cost-effective sampling and analytic methods to improve national health estimates for small racial/ethnic groups. Since 2006, he has led the CMS Medicare CAHPS® (Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems) Analysis project assessing patient experiences for 400,000 surveyed beneficiaries annually.