Data on Insurance Reported by Researchers at Rand Corporation (Telephone Follow-up On Medicare Patient Surveys Remains Critical): Insurance

2025 MAR 04 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health Policy and Law Daily -- Researchers detail new data in Insurance. According to news reporting originating from Santa Monica, California, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “Patient experience surveys are essential to measuring patient-centered care, a key component of health care quality. Low response rates in underserved groups may limit their representation in overall measure performance and hamper efforts to assess health equity.”

Financial support for this research came from CMS.

Our news editors obtained a quote from the research from Rand Corporation, “Telephone follow-up improves response rates in many health care settings, yet little recent work has examined this for surveys of Medicare enrollees, including those with Medicare Advantage. Our objective was to describe response rates to the 2022 Medicare Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (MCAHPS) surveys and the completion mode (mail or telephone), overall and by person-level characteristics. Cross-sectional survey. Participants were 1,092,434 individuals with Medicare who were selected to receive the 2022 MCAHPS survey in the 50 states and the District of Columbia and who were representative of the Medicare population. Study measures were survey response and completion mode. The overall response rate was 33.7% (31.3% by mail and 2.3% by telephone), with 6.9% of responses by telephone. Despite the low overall telephone response rate, the phone was used at markedly higher rates by respondents in some groups with lower overall response rates who are thus underrepresented among respondents, including those who were younger than 65 years (eligible for Medicare due to disability: 16.5% of responses by telephone), Black (16.1%), or Hispanic (14.1%) or had limited income and assets (14.6%). Including a telephone component in the administration of the MCAHPS survey continues to have value because several groups still show a relative preference for survey completion by telephone.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Steps should be taken to improve response rates by telephone.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Telephone Follow-up On Medicare Patient Surveys Remains Critical. American Journal of Managed Care, 2025;31(1). American Journal of Managed Care can be contacted at: Managed Care & Healthcare Communications Llc, 666 Plainsboro Rd, Ste 300, Plainsboro, NJ 08536, USA.

The news editors report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Marc N. Elliott, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, United States. Additional authors for this research include Ann Haas, Amelia M. Haviland, Denise D. Quigley, Nate Orr, Julie Brown and Sarah Gaillot.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.37765/ajmc.2025.89668. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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