Attachment V - Recruitment email

Attachment V. — Recruitment Email or Letter

[DATE]

[Jane Smith (FIRST NAME and LAST NAME of potential respondent identified by HSAG)]

[Hospital]

[Address]

[City], [State Abbreviation] [ZIP]

Dear [TITLE and LAST NAME]:

The RAND Corporation has been asked by Health Services Advisory Group, Inc. (HSAG), on behalf of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), to assess hospitals’ experiences in reporting and working to improve performance on CMS measures. We are writing to ask you to take part in this assessment.

CMS uses a variety of performance measures to assess the quality and efficiency of care provided to Medicare beneficiaries in the hospital setting. Hospitals report on measures included in the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) and Outpatient Quality Reporting (OQR) programs. Hospital performance on these measures is publicly reported on the Medicare Hospital Compare website, and a subset of the measures is used in the CMS Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program.

As one component of this assessment, RAND will be conducting a set of telephone interviews with hospital leadership. The purpose of these interviews is to understand how hospitals have responded to these CMS quality measurement programs and to learn of any challenges or undesired consequences they have experienced in doing so. For a summary of the interview questions and a list of hospital measures, please see the attached documents.

We would like to interview the senior-level administrator or leader within your hospital who is responsible for the delivery of care and is knowledgeable about your hospital’s performance on Medicare quality and efficiency measures and efforts to improve that performance.

Please let us know if you are the appropriate person at [HOSPITAL NAME] to answer these questions. If you think we should talk with someone else, please provide the name and contact information for that person.

We are very flexible in when we can schedule the interview, so that it is at a convenient time for you. It will take no longer than one hour.

All of the information we collect will be kept strictly confidential, and you can decline to discuss any topic that you do not want to discuss. No one outside of the research project will have access to the information. HSAG and RAND will summarize what we learn from the interviews, aggregating information. No one will be identified by name or hospital affiliation.

We know that your time is very valuable, and we wish to thank you in advance for helping us obtain input from [HOSPITAL NAME].

Please call us at [SR PERSON’S PHONE NUMBER], or simply reply to this email to schedule your interview or to let us know the name of the appropriate person to interview. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Cheryl Damberg, PhD

Principal Investigator

Principal Senior Researcher

RAND

damberg@rand.org

310-393-0411 x6191

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