Monitoring the health status and impact of treatment on Americans - The medicare beneficiary health status registry

OBJECTIVE. A major new survey program, the Medicare Beneficiary Health Stat us Registry (MBHSR), has been proposed to improve the monitoring of the hea lth status of Medicare beneficiaries. The MBHSR would collect data by mail with telephone follow up of nonrespondents to permit economical assessment of a total Registry of approximately 200,000 Medicare beneficiaries, approx imately 54,000 of whom would be surveyed in any given year. (Surveys would be conducted of samples of new enrollees who would be reinterviewed every f ive years.) METHOD. TO assess the feasibility of that approach, a field test was conduc ted with a probability sample (n = 1,922) that comprised approximately equa l numbers of new Medicare enrollees (aged, 65) and current beneficiaries (a ge range, 76-80). The field test was designed to assess the quality of the data that this design would produce. FINDINGS. Results indicate that the proposed design of the MBHSR could achi eve response rates of approximately 80% among both age cohorts using a surv ey instrument that took 30 minutes to complete. Internal reliability of Act ivities of Daily Living, Instrumental Activities of Daily Living, Mobility, Mental Health Index, General Health, and Prostate Symptomatology scales ra nged from 0.77 to 0.93. When measurements were repeated approximately 30 da ys after the initial survey, moderate to high levels of cross temporal corr elation (range, 0.64-0.96) were found for most indexes, with the exception of prostate symptomatology. In addition, an earlier comparison of survey re sponses in the MBHSR field test to Medicare payment records indicated that the MBHSR field test obtained highly accurate reports of most of the major surgeries that were recorded in Medicare claims files. CONCLUSION. The design proposed for the MBHSR is feasible. If implemented, it should produce acceptably high rates of response and data quality.