Supplemental Items To Support Improvement in Health Plan Quality
To support the QI efforts of health plans, the RAND CAHPS Team conducted a series of interviews with 27 health plans around the country in 2003. The team learned that survey sponsors were pleased with the CAHPS Health Plan Survey’s scientific rigor, comparability, and standardization. However, the plans wanted more actionable information that would allow them to more effectively target and address aspects of their care that need improvement.
Development of Supplemental Items
Having established the need for supplemental items to support quality improvement at the health plan level, the RAND Team conducted a consensus-building process with the plans to identify the four domains of care that were most important to them for quality improvement purposes:
- Coordination of care
- Access to care
- Information and materials
- Customer service
The Team then proceeded to develop a set of supplemental items covering topics in each of these four domains. The items were tested with three health plans in 2004. The tests found that most of the items performed quite strongly and correlated to the hypothesized domains in the core questionnaire.
To learn more about the development of the QI supplemental items:
- Download the executive summary (PDF [204.47 KB]).
- Download the full report from RAND's Web Site at http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR336/.
Review the Items
The QI items are available for the CAHPS Health Plan Survey as part of the adult and child supplemental item sets:
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