Center for Population Health

One of the aims of SIM was to improve the patient experience of care to benefit not only the patients, but the clinics treating them as well. To improve the patient experience, it is important to get the patient’s perspective.  The SIM evaluation used a modified version of the Clinician and Group Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CG-CAHPS) survey to assess the care experiences of commercially insured and Medicaid patients in Connecticut. The survey was sent to a sample of adult (18 or older) patients in Connecticut who had made a visit to a primary care provider in the previous six months.

One notable finding was that Medicaid recipients tended to report better care experiences than did commercially insured patients. From 2017 to 2019, an average of 77.9% commercially insured individuals rated their provider a “9” or “10”, the highest rating on a scale of 0 to 10. Among Medicaid recipients, an average of 71.8% gave a rating of 9 or 10. No significant or consistent differences emerged by race and ethnicity, although it appears that Blacks (non-Hispanic) generally gave a higher rating in all categories compared with other ethnic groups. Further analyses are needed to assess the extent to which differences in patient characteristics account for differences in CAHPS scores by source of coverage and year.