the
ki ney
citizen
This May, Fill
Out Your Patient
Experience Survey
and Send It In!
By Jack Reynolds , Dialysis Patient, Dialysis Patient Citizens (DPC) Board President
The month of May brings many familiar seasonal changes.
For dialysis patients, May is one of two months each year
that you are likely to receive in your mailbox Medicare’s
CAHPS survey that asks you to rate the care delivered by your
dialysis center. This spring we are urging patients to make a
special effort to open this envelope, fill out the survey, and
mail it back (or answer the questions by phone, if you receive
a phone call). Let me explain what the survey is for and why
your participation in it is so important to maintaining the
quality of dialysis care.
Medicare uses CAHPS surveys to rate patients’ experiences
with their health care providers. The different versions of the
surveys also go to randomly selected patients discharged
from hospitals, and also to health plan enrollees.
For ESRD patients, these surveys have two special uses:
Survey responses are now being counted by Medicare’s ESRD
Quality Improvement Program toward a clinic’s total QIP
score. That means there is money at stake for a clinic with low
patient satisfaction.
Beginning in October, survey responses will be reported on
Medicare’s Dialysis Facility Compare website. That means that
current patients are in a position to make recommendations
to new patients on which center they choose to dialyze at.
Before I go any further, let me emphasize an important fact
about these surveys: they are 100% confidential. Your answers
are anonymous and go directly to Medicare. Nobody at your
clinic will know how you answered.
As you can imagine, the small size of a dialysis clinic poses some
complications for surveys relative to a hospital or health plan
that serves thousands of people. To maintain confidentiality,
Medicare does not report scores for clinics if they get fewer
than 30 responses. For small er clinics this means a large
proportion of patients need to respond in order to get a rating.
Unfortunately, the patient response rate is only 31%, and it’s
declining. (Medicare officials say declining response rates are
a problem with all surveys, not just this one.)
Because there must be at least 30 responses from a facility
for the results to count, results are only going to be available
for 40-45% of facilities. That means that come October, your
facility probably won’t have a rating posted on the Dialysis
Facility Compare website.
I know that responding to a survey is probably not your
preferred way of spending free time. Nevertheless, I always
answer and return this survey both times I get it each year. It
typically only takes 10-15 minutes.
At Dialysis Patient Citizens, our mission is to give voice to
patients, and these surveys are a very direct way of making
your voice heard. It is not just about your care and your
clinic, but about contributing to the overall improvement of
our entire health care system. We know that once hospitals
stood to lose money over poor patient satisfaction, they
made immediate changes. The number one complaint was
noise, and now hospitals make a special effort to keep their
facilities quiet! I don’t know what kind of improvements are
potentially in store for dialysis facilities, but I’m confident
that your response to the survey can only help.
5