Health Resources and Services Administration
SUPPORTING STATEMENT
HRSA Office of Regional Operations (ORO) Outreach & Education Generic Survey Tool
A. Justification
1. Circumstances of Information Collection
This is a request for OMB approval of a qualitative voluntary customer satisfaction survey under HRSA’s generic clearance.
The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) is the primary Federal agency for improving access to health care services for people who are uninsured, isolated or medically vulnerable. Within HRSA is the Office of Regional Operations (ORO), which seeks to improve health in underserved communities through on-the-ground outreach, education, technical assistance, and partnerships with local, state, and federal organizations. With 10 regional offices across the country, ORO is the face of HRSA in communities, states and regions. ORO extends the reach of HRSA’s programs through knowledge of the regional landscape, geographic proximity to HRSA’s grantees and stakeholders, and leveraging local, state, and federal partners.
ORO does the following:
Serves as the HRSA liaison and regional leader, conducting outreach to expand knowledge about HRSA's programs and priorities;
Engages federal, state, and community partners and brokers relationships to advance HHS/HRSA priorities and implementation;
Identifies and reports critical ground-level information about regional/state trends to inform HRSA's operations, decision-making, and allocation of resources; and
Provides administrative management to ensure the efficacy of HRSA's regional human capital, technology, and facilities resources.
ORO customers include but are not limited to the following: healthcare and human service providers including physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, nurses, counselors, social workers, case managers, and other staff who interact with patients, who work in multiple types of settings including primary care, geriatric care, maternal and child health care, Head Start programs, STD/HIV & reproductive health care, mental health, addictions, health departments, hospitals, health centers, schools and community health settings; state health leadership; academic institutions; tribal organizations, community and faith-based organizations and private sector organizations and foundations. Many of HRSA customers are also HRSA grantees. The goal of ORO’s outreach and education efforts is to improve customers’ knowledge and awareness of HRSA resources and provide information on health topics that attendees can then use to inform their work as it relates to increasing access and improving the quality of care of populations served by HRSA. ORO’s outreach and education customer reach is expansive and include local, state and federal stakeholders.
For the past three years, ORO has strategically developed methods by which to define and measure ORO’s benefit to HRSA and ORO’s customer base. To that end, ORO formed an Evaluation Committee to improve the organization’s ability to measure and document results. In absence of readily available systems or metrics, ORO’s Evaluation Committee developed a logic model and tools to guide, document, collect, and assess the impact and effectiveness of ORO’s regional efforts. The Committee trained regional senior leadership on the model’s key inputs, outputs, and outcomes and prepared a strategy to build ORO’s measurement and evaluation capacity. One such tool that the Evaluation Committee developed is this proposed generic survey instrument that will be used to assess the effectiveness of ORO’s outreach and education activities in all 10 ORO Regional Offices. The tool is labeled “generic” because it is meant to be an all-purpose survey that will be used to help evaluate various types of ORO outreach events including grant workshops, topical education sessions, webinars, etc. The tool is broad enough to be used for these various events but specific enough to capture key information that will help inform the quality of ORO’s outreach and education efforts.
Below are examples of outreach and education activities conducted by ORO in FY 2016:
Educated approximately 11,625 individuals from 610 organizations on HRSA’s programs.
Delivered 30 webinars on topics including telehealth, chronic health conditions, and substance abuse, reaching nearly 6,000 HRSA grantees and stakeholders.
Convened or presented at 63 events focused on behavioral health services integration into primary care and other healthcare settings, reaching approximately 6,500 individuals.
Supported efforts in states and communities to address the opioid crisis, collaborated with SAMHSA to educate providers through Drug Addiction Treatment Act (DATA) Wavier trainings in 14 States, facilitated in-person trainings, and promoted HRSA funding opportunities to address overdoses.
Aside from the output measures noted above (number of events; number of individuals touched), ORO does not have any qualitative information about these activities because currently there is no formal way to collect feedback from the participants of the events and activities that ORO conducts. Without qualitative information collected from participants, ORO is not able to fulfill Executive Order 12862, “Setting Customer Service Standards,” which directs Agencies to continually reform their management practices and operations to provide service to the public that matches or exceeds the best service available in the private sector. This proposed generic survey would allow ORO to formally collect information from customers who participate in ORO outreach and education events. Ultimately, ORO will be able to respond to customer feedback and improve the quality of outreach and educations events offered.
ORO proposes to use this generic survey tool to collect, analyze, and interpret information gathered to identify strengths and weaknesses of educational events and make improvements in service delivery based on feedback. Specifically, ORO will assess whether attendance improved attendees’ knowledge about and awareness of the topic discussed; assess the degree to which attendees found such content useful; and determine whether or not participation in all or part of the event is correlated with an anticipated change in the attendee’s approach to their work. Further, this survey tool will be utilized by all 10 Regional Offices streamlining information collection and allow for comparative analysis of survey results.
2. Purpose and Use of the Information
The information collected will serve to identify how well the educational event attained its goals of improving providers’ knowledge and awareness of health care services, providing information on a health care topic that attendees perceive as useful, and increasing the amount of health care services provided by attendee organizations. ORO staff will use the information collected to determine if similar educational events are necessary, and if changes might help to better attain the stated goals. Similarly, ORO staff will use information provided to make informed decisions about continuing, eliminating reformatting/redesigning ORO outreach and education events.
3. Use of Improved Information Technology
The generic survey tool will be made available electronically (via email, or a web based survey platform) for all events. ORO conducts outreach and education across the nation and for some areas/populations/customers access to technology (e.g. internet) is a challenge and/or is not the preferred method of communication. Some of the customers/populations ORO serves (e.g. Tribal organizations) request face to face transactions. As such, for events that may have limited access to an electronic means to complete the survey or request to receive the survey in hard copy, the tool will administered in hard copy.
4. Efforts to Avoid Duplication
The survey is designed to assess the quality of outreach and education events offered by HRSA/ORO. No other organization is collecting information on these activities.
5. Involvement of Small Entities
No small businesses will be involved in these educational events. This activity does not have significant impact on small entities.
6. Consequences if Information Collected Less Frequently
This survey is a one-time evaluation of the relevance, usefulness, and effectiveness of a time-limited educational event.
7. Consistency With the Guidelines in 5 CFR 1320.5(d)(2)
These surveys will be implemented in a manner fully consistent with 5 CFR 1320.5(d)(2).
8. Consultation Outside the Agency
The notice required in 5 CFR 1320.8(d) was published in the Federal Register on December 17, 2014, (Vol. 79, No.242, pages 75164). No public comments were received.
9. Remuneration of Respondents
Not applicable.
10. Assurance of Confidentiality
This survey will not collect any PII; participation will be voluntary and responses are anonymous.
11. Questions of a Sensitive Nature
The survey does not contain questions of a sensitive nature.
12. Estimates of Annualized Hour Burden
Respondents:
Respondents will be all educational event participants who voluntarily complete the survey after the event. The respondent will only be contacted one time to respond to the survey for a particular event. ORO estimates that outreach and education events in a given fiscal year will reach approximately 10,000 participants. ORO intends to solicit surveys from each of these participants.
Annual burden estimates:
The estimated annual burden for the one-time customer satisfaction survey for the total number of participants is 501 hours. ORO will solicit surveys from 10,000 participant and plan for a response rate of 30 percent or 3,000 respondents. The survey will take approximately 10 minutes to complete per respondent.
Type of Collection |
Number of Respondents |
Responses per Respondent |
Total Responses |
Hours per Respondent |
Total Burden Hours |
Wage Rate |
Total Hour Cost |
Educational Event Evaluation |
3,000 |
1 |
3,000 |
0.167 |
501 |
$51.591 |
25,846.59 |
Total |
3,000 |
|
3,000 |
|
501 |
|
$25,846.59 |
Planned frequency of information collection:
Surveys will be distributed one time to each participant after each outreach and education event. This is a one-time collection of data.
13. Estimates of Annualized Cost Burden to Respondents
The only cost burden to respondents is the time to complete the web-based survey.
14. Estimates of Annualized Cost to the Government
A team of two senior-level ORO staff in GS13 and GS14 (or equivalent) positions will review survey responses. We estimate that each member of the team will spend five hours reviewing the responses. The hourly rate for a GS13 Step 9 is $57.53 and the hourly rate for a GS14 Step 5 is $60.83. The total cost of this five hours review is $591.8 ($57.53 x 5 + $60.83 x 5). We will use a free online survey tool such as Survey Monkey to gather and analyze the responses. For the multiple choice/Likert scale questions, the online survey tool will calculate the number of responses per answer choice, making it easier for the ORO staff to review responses.
15. Change in Burden
Not Applicable. This is a new activity under HRSA’s generic clearance and will be included in the total burden currently approved by OMB under OMB Control No. 0915-0212.
16. Plans for Analysis and Timetable of Key Activities
The web-based and hard copy of the generic survey will be available immediately after each event. The survey will be open for two weeks. Within 3 months of each survey closing, ORO staff will review responses in order to ascertain whether additional offerings similar to this educational event would be beneficial to the field. Similarly, ORO staff will review responses to the open-ended questions to identify areas of need or interest for health care services focused educational events.
17. Exemption for Display of Expiration Date
No exemption is being requested. The expiration date will be displayed.
18. Certifications
This information collection activity will comply with the requirements in 5 CFR 1320.9.
1 The wage rate used here is the average of the mean estimated wage rates of the four professions most likely to attend the outreach and education events: Physicians/Surgeons ($97.33), Registered Nurses ($34.14), Social Workers ($23.88), and Medical and Health Services Managers ($50.99). The mean estimated wage rates used are from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm, accessed April 20, 2016.
| File Type | application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document |
| File Title | GENERIC - Supporting Statement Template |
| Author | Jodi.Duckhorn |
| File Modified | 0000-00-00 |
| File Created | 2021-01-22 |