Understanding the patient experience
Dental Plan Survey (CAHPS)
At Delta Dental of Iowa, we’re on a mission to improve the health and smiles of the people we serve. We care about your patients and their dental care experience is important to us. That’s why we’ve engaged the CAHPS Dental Plan Survey, which asks Delta Dental members about their experiences with their dental care experience. The anonymous survey is designed to provide a view into patients overall experience and satisfaction from every aspect of their dental care interactions including their dental plan, their dentist and dental team members. Working with CAHPS provides a standardized survey tool that may provide valuable patient insights for Delta Dental providers like you.
What is CAHPS?
The Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey is an anonymous standardized national survey tool used in the health care industry to evaluate patient satisfaction. The purpose of the survey is to support and promote the assessment of patients’ experiences with access to dental services and providers.
The survey is a validated patient experience survey tool developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Inaugurated in 1995, the CAHPS survey is used by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, the National Committee for Quality Assurance, and Veterans Affairs. The CAHPS Dental Plan Survey was first administered in 2006 by the U.S. military for the TriCare dental services program. Delta Dental is the first commercial health insurer to deploy the CAHPS Dental Plan Survey nationally to advance the patient-centered approach to delivering oral health care.
Why CAHPS?
Participating in the CAHPS Dental Plan Survey enables Delta Dental to take meaningful steps to further improve patient-centered care. The survey provides the opportunity to better understand our patients’ experiences with their dental plan or visiting a dental office. With this feedback, Delta Dental can improve its products and services to better serve our customers. It also gives us an opportunity to share the insights we’ve learned with participating dentists to further enhance the patient experience.
How the survey works
The CAHPS Dental Plan Survey will be sent to a sampling of adult patients who are covered by a Delta Dental plan by email or text message within 30 days of seeing their general dentist. Patients will only receive one survey per calendar year, regardless of the number of times they visit the dentist in that year.
Survey topics
Questions within the survey provide a view into the overall patient experience and satisfaction from every aspect of their oral health care interactions.
Topics include:
- Overall rating of the dental plan
- Dental plan information and services
- Overall rating of ease of finding a dentist
- Access to dental care
- Overall rating of dental care
- Care from dentists and staff
Office specific feedback
The results specific to experiences with your dental team and office staff will be shared once there are 30 or more responses from your patients, enough to provide a statistically valid assessment. Patient information is confidential, so you will not know which patients have taken the Dental Plan Survey, or how individual patients responded. It will take some time to have 30 completed surveys for an individual dentist/office. Once that volume level is reached, the Professional Relations Department will be reaching out to your office.
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