Testing of Web Survey Design and Administration for CMS Experience of Care Surveys (CMS-10694)

Response rates for population surveys have been steadily declining, raising concerns among researchers and policy makers about the future of survey research as it exists currently. Seeking to counteract this trend, remain at the cutting edge of survey research, and work within the constraints of ever-shrinking budgets, an increasing number of federal surveys have been exploring the use of web components in their data collection efforts. This generic clearance request is for web methodological research, “Testing of Web Survey Design and Administration for CMS Experience of Care Surveys.” This generic clearance request encompasses an array of research activities to add web administration protocols to a series of surveys conducted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). This request seeks burden hours to allow CMS and its contractors to conduct cognitive in-depth interviews, focus groups, pilot tests, and usability studies to support a variety of methodological studies around web modes of data collection. The administration of web-based surveys should be more economical than employing strictly traditional modes (mail-only, phone-only, and mixed-mode that includes mail with phone follow-up of non-respondents), but there are challenges that must be addressed to ensure valid, reliable data are collected. All of these challenges will be explored in this package across a variety of settings. The CMS vision for this research is to ensure that we can continue to collect quality data using more innovative, efficient, and analytically powerful modes of data collection. This research is aimed at a broad audience of those affected by CMS programs such as Emergency Department Experience of Care (EDPEC), Fee-for-Service (FFS) Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS), Hospital CAHPS (HCAHPS), Medicare Advantage and Prescription Drug (MA & PDP) CAHPS, Home Health (HH) CAHPS, Hospice CAHPS, In-Center Hemodialysis (ICH) CAHPS, the Health Outcomes Survey (HOS), and the Medicare Advantage and Part D Plan Disenrollment Reasons surveys. This effort will move CMS towards more innovative approaches for data collection with the hope of reducing burden and costs of data collection while improving response rates.

The latest form for Testing of Web Survey Design and Administration for CMS Experience of Care Surveys (CMS-10694) expires 2022-11-30 and can be found here.