Medicare Advantage Customer Service Is Used Most by Higher-Need Patients
Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollees who are in poorer general and mental health and who have greater medical complexity are more likely to use their plan's customer service.
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Marc N. Elliott is a senior principal researcher at RAND and holds its Distinguished Chair in Statistics. His areas of interest include health equity, quality measurement, Medicare, healthcare experiences, survey sampling, experimental design, causal inference, and case-mix adjustment in U.S. and UK applications. He has developed Bayesian methods of estimating race and ethnicity and associated disparities using name and address information. Elliott led Office of Minority Health work developing novel, cost-effective sampling and analytic methods to improve national health estimates for smaller racial and ethnic groups.
Since 2006, he has led the CMS Medicare CAHPS® (Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems) Analysis project, assessing patient experiences for 400,000 surveyed beneficiaries annually. Since 2012, he has been the RAND co-PI of AHRQ’s CAHPS project and was RAND’s lead statistician on that project 1996–2012. Elliott is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the first recipient of its Mid-Career Award (Health Policy Section). He has published more than 475 peer-reviewed articles (H-index=101). In 2014, Elliott was recognized by Thomson Reuters as one of the Top 1% of Cited Scientists 2002–2012. In 2023, he was named one of the world's 100 most-cited social scientists by Research.com. In 2024, Elliott was ranked #2 in the World, #1 in the United States in patient experience by ScholarGPS. He holds a Ph.D. in statistics from Rice University.
Education
Ph.D. in statistics, Rice University; M.A. in statistics, Rice University; B.A. in statistics, Rice University; B.A. in psychology, Rice University
Selected Work
- Elliott MN, Klein DJ, et al., "Using Predicted Spanish Preference to Target Bilingual Mailings in a Mail Survey with Telephone Follow-up," Health Services Research, 2018
- Elliott MN, Landon B, et al., "Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Enrollees Report Less Positive Experiences Than Their Medicare Advantage Counterparts," Health Affairs, 35(3), 2016
- Elliott MN, Beckett MK, Lehrman WG, Cleary PD, Cohea C, Giordano LA, Goldstein E, Damberg C, "Understanding The Role Medicare's Patient Experience Points System Plays In Hospital Reimbursement," Heath Affairs, 35(9), 2016
- Elliott MN, Finch BK, et al., "Sample Designs for Measuring the Health of Small Racial Ethnic Subgroups," Statistics in Medicine, 27(20), 2008
- Elliott MN, Dahlhamer JM, MacCarthy S, Beckett MK, Orr N, Guerino P, Agniel D, Saunders CL, Schuster MA, Ng JH, Martino SC, "Using Ancillary Sociodemographic Data to Identify Sexual Minority Adults among Those Responding “Something Else” or “Don't Know” to Sexual Orientation Questions," Medical Care, 57(12), 2019
- Elliott MN, Adams JL, Klein DJ, Haviland AM, Beckett MK, Hays RD, Gaillot S, Edwards CA, Dembosky JW, Schneider EC, "Patient-Reported Care Coordination is Associated with Better Performance on Clinical Care Measures," Journal of General Internal Medicine, 36(12), 2021
- Elliott MN, Brown JA, et al., "Survey Protocols, Response Rates, and Representation of Underserved Patients," JAMA Health Forum, 5(1), 2024
- Elliott MN, Beckett MK, et al., "Changes in Patient Experiences of Hospital Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic," JAMA Health Forum, 4(8), 2023