Development of Supplemental Quality Improvement Items for the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS)

The Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) was initiated by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in 1995 to establish survey and reporting products that provide consumers information on health plan and provider performance as judged by other consumers who have used the health plan. It was learned during the first CAHPS development work that various stakeholders have very different perspectives and uses for CAHPS. AHRQ initiated a second CAHPS project (CAHPS® II) in 2002, working with a consortium of RAND Corporation, American Institutes for Research, the Harvard Medical School, and Westat, to address concerns expressed by health plans and health care providers that CAHPS does not provide them the information they need to improve performance in areas of importance to consumers.

Using a structured consensus process, RAND worked with health plans to identify the specific issues of concern to them regarding the usability of CAHPS results for quality-improvement actions. Results of interviews with health plans confirmed their desire to have supplemental items available that they could use to collect more action-oriented data for quality improvement. In response to this issue, priority domains — coordination of care, access to care, information and materials, and customer service — and topic areas for item development were identified, and items for those areas were developed and field-tested.