Medicare Advantage and Fee‐for‐Service Performance on Clinical Quality and Patient Experience Measures: Comparisons from Three Large States

Objective

To compare performance between Medicare Advantage () and Fee‐for‐Service () Medicare during a time of policy changes affecting both programs.

Data Sources/Study Setting

Performance data for 16 clinical quality measures and 6 patient experience measures for 9.9 million beneficiaries living in California, New York, and Florida.

Study Design

We compared and performance overall, by plan type, and within service areas associated with contracts between and organizations. Case mix‐adjusted analyses (for measures not typically adjusted) were used to explore the effect of case mix on / differences.

Data Collection/Extraction Methods

Performance measures were submitted by organizations, obtained from the nationwide fielding of the Medicare Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems () Survey, or derived from claims.

Principal Findings

Overall, outperformed on all 16 clinical quality measures. Differences were large for measures and small for Part D measures and remained after case mix adjustment. enrollees reported better experiences overall, but beneficiaries reported better access to care. Relative to , performance gaps were much wider for s than s. Excluding measures, / differences were much smaller in contract‐level comparisons.

Conclusions

Medicare Advantage/Fee‐for‐Service differences are often large but vary in important ways across types of measures and contracts.