Survey Instrument

From: Masnick M, Morgan DJ, Macek MD, Sorkin JD, Brown JP, Rheingans P, Harris AD. Improving the Understanding of Publicly Reported Healthcare-Associated Infection (HAI) Data. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2016. [PubMed | PDF]

This is the final version of the survey instrument used in the manuscript cited above.

Patients were randomly assigned to one of two arms: (1) the new presentation method; (2) the existing "detailed" presentation method from CMS Hospital Compare.

The same underlying data is used for both arms; only the presentation method differs. Questions are presented in the same order for both arms.

Each question asked participants to select one possible answer from a list of options. The options were the same for all questions across both arms.

Survey contents

The survey instrument was divided into 3 sections:
  1. Eligibility assessment and introduction
    This section was identical to the survey instrument used in a prior study. We have provided a PDF of the relevant pages here.

  2. Hospital comparison questions
    See below.

  3. Use/utility of hospital comparison website and demographics questions
    Again, this section was identical to the survey instrument used in a prior study. We have provided a PDF of the relevant pages here.

2) Hospital comparison survey questions

The survey questions for both arms follow below.

Questions are divided into 4 scenarios of 3 questions each:

Questions are in order from 1 to 12 below, so questions in the same scenario are grouped together. In the actual survey administered to patients, they were shuffled into the following order for all respondents: 

Question 8
Question 11
Question 2
Question 4
Question 5
Question 10
Question 9
Question 3
Question 12
Question 7
Question 6
Question 1

About the new presentation method

The new presentation method uses "dot ratings" to describe the performance of a hospital:

Infection dot rating Description
●○○○ 95% upper CI < 1; SIR point estimate < 0.42 (this is 1 SD for CAUTIs in the CMS Hospital Compare data)
●●○○○ 95% upper CI < 1; SIR point estimate between 0.42 and 1
●●●○○ 95% upper CI > 1; SIR point estimate < 1
●●●●○ 95% upper CI > 1; SIR point estimate between 1 and 2.4 (1 SD)
●●●●● 95% upper CI > 1; SIR point estimate > 2.4 (1 SD)
The confidence in the dot rating is rated as low/moderate/high:
Confidence dot rating Description
High High confidence: 1/2 of IQR or smaller; IQR = 6.63 for SIR 95% CI width for CAUTI
Moderate Moderate confidence: Between 1/2 IQR and 1 IQR
Low Low confidence: > 1 IQR

Hey! Make your window ← wider → to see the two data presentation methods side-by-side.