Brief Description of the MHOS Surveys
The Medicare Health Outcomes Survey (MHOS) is the first patient-based
outcomes measure in Medicare managed care. It is a longitudinal survey that
assesses physical and mental functioning of beneficiaries, and includes
additional information about functional status, smoking status and chronic
medical conditions.
The HOS has been fielded nationally since 1998 as a Healthcare Effectiveness
Data and Information Set (HEDIS®) effectiveness of care measure, and has
been used to assess the functional health outcomes and health-related quality of
life (HRQOL) of Medicare managed care beneficiaries. For the years 1998 - 2005 the HOS
version 1.0 evaluated the physical and mental health status of the beneficiaries
using a 36-item Health Survey. Physical health and mental health functioning
were measured with the Physical Component Summary (PCS) and Mental Component
Summary (MCS) scores, respectively, which were derived from the survey.
In 2006, CMS implemented the Medicare HOS 2.0. The HOS 2.0 evaluates the HRQOL of Medicare Advantage beneficiaries by measuring their physical and mental health status using the Veterans RAND 12-item Health Survey (VR-12). Use of this HOS 2.0 instrument reduces beneficiary burden while maintaining comparability of HOS results over time.
The HOS is a self-administered, mailed survey with telephone follow-up. The
protocol includes a mailed pre-notification postcard, a first mailing of the
survey, a reminder/thank you postcard, a second mailing of the survey to people
who did not respond initially, and up to six follow-up telephone calls to those
individuals who did not respond to the second mailing.
For data collection years 1998-2006, a baseline survey was administered to 1,000 randomly selected
Medicare managed care beneficiaries per plan, drawn from the entire United
States. Effective 2007, the plan sample size was increased to twelve hundred. A follow-up survey is administered to the same cohort two years later if
the beneficiaries are still enrolled in the health plan.
The linked SEER-MHOS database presently available includes eight cohorts of
MHOS data (baseline and follow up) covering the data collection years of
1998 - 2007. Researchers can find more information about HOS at www.cms.gov/hos and www.hosonline.org .
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