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Tailored Strategies to Enhance Survey Response among Proxies of Deceased Patients
Author(s) -
Gu Qian,
Hassol Andrea,
Creel Alisha,
Keating Nancy L.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
health services research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.706
H-Index - 121
eISSN - 1475-6773
pISSN - 0017-9124
DOI - 10.1111/1475-6773.12991
Subject(s) - proxy (statistics) , medicine , purchasing , family medicine , emergency medicine , demography , statistics , business , marketing , mathematics , sociology
Objective To enhance proxy survey responses for deceased cancer patients. Data Sources Two waves of surveys about care experiences of cancer chemotherapy patients (used for a value‐based purchasing initiative), collected November 2016 through March 2017. Study Design Surveys were mailed to deceased patients (for proxy response) in the untailored first survey wave, and using a tailored strategy in the second wave. We compared proxy responses for deceased patients with and without the tailored approach. Principal Findings A tailored survey approach improved the proxy response rate from 17.6 percent to 39.0 percent. Conclusions Simple tailoring strategies can significantly enhance proxy response rates when surveying patients in a high mortality population. However, we were unable to address the impact of higher proxy response rates on response bias since we surveyed different patients in each wave.