These four measures show what patients experienced during their last visit to their doctor. Patients who were surveyed rated their doctor and overall office visit on how well care was provided. The survey asks about key things that should be part of every patient visit, including prompt care, good communication, and respectful staff.
Survey Methodology
This information is based on patient responses to surveys about clinics in Minnesota. Overall, 124 clinics took part in the survey. Future surveys will include more clinics.
The survey was mailed by independent survey companies in two waves during the survey period, from September to November 2008. Surveys were sent to a randomly-selected sample of patients from each clinic. A patient had to have at least one visit to a participating primary care (family practice and internal medicine) clinic in May - July of 2008 in order to be selected for the survey.
The survey used was the
CAHPS Clinician and Group Survey (CG-CAHPS), which asks questions about Access to Care, Doctor Communication, Office Staff and Overall Rating. The data was collected and analyzed to produce the results reported on Minnesota HealthScores. Overall, 39% of the patients who received a survey mailed back a response. All results reported were tested for reliability and reached the minimum criteria for public reporting. Those clinics that are missing results for one or more measures did not receive enough completed surveys to reliably report their score.
The Data
Percentage
For each measure category, the percentage shown is the proportion of patients reporting "yes" for the questions in each category. For example, in the "Getting Care When Needed" category, if a clinic scored 95%, that means that 95% of patients surveyed answered "yes" when asked questions about this topic (for example, that they saw the doctor within 15 minutes of their appointment time).
Top Performance
Clinics that had the top performance on a particular measure are reported with green bars. Top performance means that the clinic's score for that measure is statistically higher than the average of all clinics.
