Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #109059

Shaunessye Curry, MA¹, Sheila Avruch¹, Joy Kraybill¹, Krister Friday¹, Mary Reich, Esq², Sari Shuman¹, Ramsey Asaly¹, Alexis Chaudron³, Perry Parsons¹, and Leslie Spangler¹. (1) Health Care team - Program Administration and Integrity group, U.S. Government Accountability Office, 200 W. Adams, Suite 700, Chicago, IL 60606, 3122207689, currys@gao.gov, (2) Office of General Counsel, U.S. Government Accountability Office, 441 G Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20548, (3) U.S. Government Accountability Office, University of North Carolina, 441 G Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20548

Medicare is a federal program that helps pay for health care services and supplies for approximately 41 million elderly and disabled beneficiaries. To provide accurate, and timely information, in March 1999 the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented a nationwide toll-free telephone call line—1-800-MEDICARE—which Medicare beneficiaries and other members of the public can call to ask questions about program eligibility, enrollment, and benefits. In this session, I will discuss GAO's findings from our survey of Medicare call centers. We used qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate (1) the accuracy of information that 1-800-MEDICARE provides, (2) the training given to 1-800-MEDICARE phone representatives, and (3) CMS's efforts to monitor the accuracy of information provided through the 1-800-MEDICARE help line. Using six questions about Medicare, we placed a total of 420 calls to the 1-800-MEDICARE help line. We also reviewed relevant documents and interviewed officials about their training, oversight, and monitoring activities. We found that the call line representatives accurately answered questions posed to 61 percent of the calls we placed. Although the help line provided instruction and training to its call line representatives, the training was not sufficient to ensure that questions posed by our callers were answered accurately and CMS's monitoring was not designed to identify and systematically track responses to questions that were commonly answered incorrectly.

Learning Objectives:

At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to
• Understand the challenges health care institutions face in desseminating accurate and complete information to large groups of people via call centers, and
• Identify effective solutions for establishing call centers as a means to communicate information.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.