Telephone follow-up on Medicare patient surveys remains critical

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. 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. Steps should be taken to improve response rates by telephone.