Development of a consumer survey for behavioral health services

A consumer survey was designed to assess the quality of mental health and substance abuse services and evaluate insurance plans that provide such services. This paper describes the development of the Consumer Assessment of Behavioral Health Services instrument, which began with a review of existing consumer satisfaction surveys and input from several groups working toward development of nationally standardized satisfaction instruments. Consumer focus groups were used to ensure that all the important domains of quality were included, and group members were interviewed to ensure that all items on the instrument were understandable. Results of a pilot test conducted with 160 consumers, 82 enrolled in Medicaid plans and 78 in commercial plans, suggested that the survey was able to distinguish between the two groups in terms of evaluations of their care and insurance plans. Future efforts will focus on further testing of larger, more diverse samples and on developing scoring and reporting formats for the survey that will be useful to consumers and purchasers in choosing behavioral health services and plans.