Public comments and response

Attachment 2a – Public Comments

1. Comment on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Notice: Survey of Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Provider Practices in the United States (0920-16BFQ) 2016-23925

the American people do not need to be gouged to pay for these surveys to be done every year. every 5 years if often enough. this agency is just a big spender and we need to cut the size of govt down. they spend too much and do nothing to really help America. I am totally opposed to this unnecessary collection of information.

2. Comment on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Notice: Survey of Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Provider Practices in the United States (0920-16BFQ) 2016-23925

The CDC indicates, in the Federal Register notice, that they intend to use the AMA Masterfile as the sample frame for the survey. The AMA Masterfile is costly and has been shown to be of inferior quality, with regard to address accuracy, when compared to NPPES (free) and SK&A.

I highly recommend review of this article whereby the authors attempted to verify contact information for physicians across three different sample frames (AMA Masterfile, NPPES, and SK&A).

http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-015-3380-9

I would strongly urge the CDC to reconsider the sample frame for this study.

Response to December 1, 2016 Public Comment from NYC (See Att2c NYC)

From: Leichliter, Jami (CDC/OID/NCHHSTP)
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2016 2:27 PM
To: Varma, Jay (CDC health.nyc.gov) <[email protected]>
Subject: response to comments (Survey of STD Provider Practices in the United States)

Dear Dr. Varma,

Thank you for submitting comments to our proposed data collection - Survey of Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Provider Practices in the United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - Docket No. CDC-2016-0096).  We are glad that you agree the information gathered from this data collection is needed and will be helpful.  We have addressed each of your comments below to provide additional information.

Generalizability of the data

We have designed the survey to be generalizable.  Specifically, data will be representative of providers from five key specialties and for public and private providers at a national-level.  We are also attempting to have representative data for each U.S. Census Region. 

Consider decreases in public health funding when examining results for public providers

This is an excellent comment and we agree that this is a necessary consideration.  In fact, in a recent publication currently under review, we have discussed this issue in relation to STD services offered by local health departments (from a separate survey of state and local health departments).

Collaborate and seek input from local health departments as they may be more aware of capacity etc. in their jurisdictions & providing information at state, regional, local level

Although we agree that it would be useful to have data generalizable at the state or local level, we did not have the budget to support a survey of this magnitude.  However, our survey design should provide generalizable data for specialty, public/private and Census region.  Thus, we are hopeful that these data could be used by local health departments in discussions with providers in their jurisdictions. 

Provider awareness of statutes and recommendations in their states

During survey development, we considered asking “knowledge” related items including awareness of state statutes.  However, survey length can have a negative impact on response rate.  Therefore, in order to keep the survey to ~20-30 mins in length, we omitted any items not focusing on provider practices and policies.  Additionally, we have made plans to link provider practices to the policies listed on our website and other policy datasets that we have.  Finally, we agree that we wanted providers to be more aware of CDC’s STD page (which provides information including the compendium of state statutes); therefore, we direct respondents to this website when they complete the survey.

We thank you for your feedback.

Best,

Jami

Jami Leichliter, PhD

Team lead, policy science

Division of STD Prevention

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

[email protected]

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