Getting Your Practice Involved in MHQP’s Statewide Patient Experience Survey

Your Patients Have a Story to Tell

As a provider organization with primary care practices dedicated to quality improvement, you want to hear their feedback in the form of meaningful and actionable data that can drive measurable improvements in the care you provide.

For more than a decade, MHQP has helped healthcare provider groups in Massachusetts hear from patients through one of our most powerful tools, the Statewide Patient Experience Survey (PES). This time-tested and valued instrument captures feedback from a large sample of adult and pediatric patients across the state. Your practice can use the statistically reliable and valid results to:

• Inform and drive your quality improvement efforts
• Compare and contrast your performance in a wide variety of areas
• Comply with and succeed in multi-payer health plan incentives programs

Your patients’ experience is critical to the success of your practice. We encourage you to make the most of this important opportunity to learn about their perspective of the care you provide.

Understanding Patient Experience Is Critical to Success

Across the country, healthcare providers have been working to make care more patient-centered by empowering patients and families to partner with providers in healthcare decision-making. Developing a deep understanding of your patients’ experience is a critically important driver of improvement success in this environment. Research shows that better patient experience leads to enhanced clinical quality processes, increased patient adherence to treatment protocols, and improved health outcomes. In addition, recognizing the benefits of a patient-centered approach to care, payers are increasingly implementing financial incentives for providers to incorporate patient engagement and shared decision-making into care models.

The Power of a Statewide Survey

MHQP’s Statewide Patient Experience Survey (PES) methodology incorporates the highest scientific standards to produce actionable results. Our rigorous and statistically valid methodology helps your practice achieve health plan pay-for-performance incentives. As the only Statewide PES in Massachusetts, the MHQP survey offers unique benefits:

• Statewide and regional benchmarks and comparisons with peer practices across Massachusetts
• Ability to trend at the state and practice level over time
• Robust multi-payer data with reliable performance measurement for large and small practices
• Alignment with health plan quality incentive program measures
• A variety of survey options at competitive prices, with discounts available based on the type and volume of survey product(s) selected
• Options to survey patients at practice and/or individual provider level
• Clear, easy-to-understand results, including detailed datasets, reports, and in-depth patient comments, along with consultation to help interpret results

The Benefits of Surveying at the Individual Provider Level

The MHQP survey offers the option of surveying patients at the individual provider level. While this approach requires a greater investment, it may be worth considering for your practice. Provider level drill-down will enable you to identify and reward top performers, uncover and address variation, provide individualized data-driven feedback for quality improvement efforts, and recognize and share best practices. It also offers the opportunity to participate in the growing trend toward physician level transparency.

Hear In-Depth Comments

Patient comments provide additional, more textured information to help your practice understand what you can do to improve patient care and experience. MHQP’s PES survey now routinely captures patient comments in a systematic way and we display and categorize these comments to be actionable for health care providers. For survey respondents who answer online, we collect patient comments using  the CAHPS® Patient Narrative Item Set, which is a set of open-ended questions that prompt survey respondents to tell a clear and comprehensive story about their experience with a health care provider. You can learn more about how MHQP is using artificial intelligence to make patient comments more actionable for practice improvement here.

Email Option

MHQP offers you the opportunity to submit patient email addresses to enable electronic modes of surveying. This option creates the opportunity to collect patient comments, and also has the advantage of lower costs and higher response rates.  Providers can share patient email addresses with MHQP to help increase response rates.  Plus, the comments provided by patients who respond online can be shared with the provider.

Survey Specifications

Survey Instrument:

MHQP’s patient experience survey instruments are based on the CAHPS^® Clinician & Group Visit Survey 4.0 (beta version) to assess patient experience with both office-based and virtual health care. The instruments also include additional items and composites developed by MHQP as well as validated measurement scales developed by other researchers and organizations.

Target Population:

• Adult patients in primary care practice sites
• Parents/guardians of children served by pediatric practices

Survey Methods:

• Surveys launch each year in mid-spring to early summer
• Standard two-wave mail administration with option of online survey
• Email mode utilizing practice and health plan email data to send an electronic survey invitation