Ah, the CAHPS Survey … how I love filling them out with a freshly sharpened #2 pencil. How I love digging through that kitchen junk drawer we all have to find a stamp. How I love placing that return envelope in the metal box at the top of my driveway (after I dust the cobwebs off, of course).
All jokes about the floundering postal system aside, my Blue Button patient journey has made me hyper aware of the potential for non-electronic processes to become digitized. In the case of patient satisfaction surveys, I ask not only, why not? But also, why hasn’t it already been done?
The CAHPS (Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) survey is produced by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and was designed to provide healthcare facilities with a way to measure and improve the patient experience. As an engaged patient (and a busy, working mom), my experience would be improved if I were offered the convenient alternative of taking CAHPS surveys online.
I realize I’m getting more into user experience than necessarily discussing the Blue Button initiative, but I feel the two are ultimately a means to the same end – more engaged patients, more effective care and better outcomes.
I think it would be great if I could check a box during the set up of my profile in the patient portal that alerts my provider to the fact that I do or don’t want to take surveys online. The paper option will still be preferable to some, but it would be nice to have the choice right off the bat. Perhaps this is already being done and I just haven’t experienced it yet in my neck of the woods. Let me know in the comments below if you’ve taken patient satisfaction surveys online, and/or via your patient portal, and if it was more convenient/easier to fill out.
In other news, I had a great conversation with David Goldsmith at Dossia about the evolution of that personal health record, which is currently being rolled out through employers. It seems like a really intuitive tool whose only hangup is keeping users engaged once they switch jobs and lose that connection to payer data that originally populated their profile.
Beth Friedman, founder of Agency Ten22 (a founding sponsor of HealthcareScene.com’s upcoming Healthcare IT Marketing & PR Conference), was kind enough to comment on one of my previous Blue Button blogs alerting me to AHIMA’s MyPHR.com, which provides information about getting started with personal health records. (I was happy to find that AHIMA has taken the Blue Button pledge, and has a section devoted to it at this site.)
I found the article, “Quick Guide to Creating a PHR” helpful. It was easy to understand and seems to be written for the average healthcare consumer. I’m surprised that it leans so heavily on paper-based processes, but that’s probably a first step that most people would be comfortable with before moving on to digital processes. I was disappointed that it didn’t offer suggestions for Internet-based PHRs. I’d feel more confident using a particular product if it was endorsed by an association like AHIMA. I’m hoping Beth will let me know if that’s something AHIMA plans to do in the future.
