The Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) is funding a 5-year project to help consumers identify the best health care plans and services for their needs. The goals of the Consumer Assessment of Health Plans (CAHPS®) are to (1) develop and test questionnaires that assess health plans and services, (2) produce easily understandable reports for communicating survey information to consumers, and (3) evaluate the usefulness of these reports for consumers in selecting health care plans and services.
This is a collaborative effort funded on an extensive history of publicly and privately funded research and survey efforts. The questionnaires and reports to consumers have been developed under cooperative agreements between Harvard University, RAND, Research Triangle Institute, and AHCPR. CAHPS® builds on previous focus groups and research about consumer needs for health care decisionmaking as well as public and private survey and report card efforts.
The CAHPS® team and AHCPR worked closely with the health care industry and consumers to ensure that the CAHPS® tools are useful to both individual consumers as well as institutional purchasers of health plans. The questionnaires and reports have been evaluated in demonstration sites.
Early in 1997, CAHPS® 1.0 versions of questionnaires and consumer reports were released and were used by a number of employers and State Medicaid programs. In addition, CAHPS® entered its demonstration phase in which CAHPS® questionnaires and reports are being assessed in a process and outcome evaluation. Those demonstrations will continue until the completion of the project in September 2000.
In 1998, AHCPR and the CAHPS® Consortium updated and improved CAHPS® based on data from their demonstration sites, cognitive testing results, and feedback from sponsors. In addition, AHCPR, the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and the CAHPS® Consortium have recently completed a convergence of the CAHPS® survey and the NCQA Member Satisfaction Survey. NCQA will require health plans to use a new questionnaire comprised of the Core and the HEDIS supplement for HEDIS 1999 reporting and NCQA accreditation. This new NCQA instrument is called CAHPS® 2.0H. The questionnaires will be referred to as CAHPS® 2.0H only if they are used for HEDIS 1999 and NCQA accreditation purposes. CAHPS® 2.0 is available now (select for Questionnaires).
The Health Care Financing Administration is using CAHPS® to report on consumers' assessments of their Medicare managed care plans. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management will use CAHPS® in 1999 to report consumer assessments of their health plans to Federal employees. Revised CAHPS® consumer reports will be available in Spring 1999.
Select for Contents of Overview report.
Current as of December 1998
Send Questions & Comments to: cahps@ahrq.gov
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