Objectives/Methodology
Objectives
To measure patient access to appropriate emergency information and availability of healthcare professionals after-hours for urgent care issues.
Methodology
- A target of 50 completed primary care physician surveys were attempted per physician organization. The physician sample was drawn from the provider file submitted to CSS by the group for the Patient Assessment Survey (PAS) project. Only providers flagged by the group as a PCP and who had at least one claim for 2008 were included in the After Hours Survey.
- Surveys were concluded using a telephone interviewing methodology. The interviews were conducted after normal business hours between 6:30 pm and 9:00 pm during March through May 2009. In the event that a group uses a call center that operates 24/7 and is staffed healthcare professions and requires member identification to access a healthcare professional their score will be based on a description of their protocol.
- Survey questions were tailored to whether an interviewer reached a live person, a recording or an auto-attendant.
- In the event that a phone tree or message offered an option to dial a different number to reach a physician directly, the survey vendor was instructed to end the call and record that the physician was available immediately, in order to minimize intrusion on the physician's time.
- Only completed interviews were used in the analysis of the data. If the response choice "don't know" or "refused" was selected for a particular question, those responses were not included in the analysis of that particular question.
- Responses for questions were scored as follows:
- Fully compliant - appropriate emergency instructions are provided - options 1, 2 or 3.
- Non-compliant - clear emergency instructions are not provided.
- Responses for Question 2 and 3 were scored as follows:
- Fully compliant - provider contact information is available and the patient is assured that they will communicate within the next four hours.
- Non-compliant - there is no process in place for a patient to speak by phone with a health care professional within four hours.
- If a phone number appears more than once in a particular sample set, the vendor will call each unique number once if an automated response is received. If a person answers, they will verify that response for each physician listed in the sample is the same and record any differences.
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