Home Health & Hospice Week

Mode experiment results give hospices a clue.

Keep an eye on future hospice rules to see whether the way CAHPS surveys are administered will get a revamp.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has released results from its 2021 hospice CAHPS survey mode experiment. “CMS will use mode experiment results to inform decisions about potential changes to administration protocols and survey instrument content,” the agency says in the one-page results brief. “Changes will be proposed during future rulemaking,” it adds.

“Fifty-six large hospices participated in the mode experiment, representing a range of geographic regions, ownership, and past performance on the CAHPS Hospice Survey,” CMS reports. “A total of 15,515 decedents/caregivers were randomly sampled from these hospices.”

The best response rate, 45.3 percent, was for the “mail-telephone” mode; followed by 39.7 percent for web-mail mode (email invitation to a web survey, with mail follow-up to nonresponders); 35.1 percent for mail-only mode; and 31.5 percent telephone-only mode.

The experiment also tested a streamlined mail-only survey, but results were about the same as the old survey —35.1 percent vs. 34.2 percent.

See more details at https://hospicecahpssurvey.org/globalassets/hospice-cahps4/home-page/cahps-hospice-mode-experiment-website-summary-final-10132022.pdf.