Member Health Surveys Project Overview
Historically, the Member Health Survey (MHS) was implemented to meet Kaiser Permanente Northern California researchers’ needs for statistics to include in research proposals and publications and Kaiser Permanente Northern California health education departments’ needs for data to plan patient and health education services for the adult membership and community. Also around this time, the National Institute of Medicine was promoting the concept of community-oriented primary care, which called for complementary use of epidemiologic data and primary care skills to systematically identify and address the health care needs of a defined population. In 1990, when the MHS was first piloted, there was little information about non-hospitalized Kaiser Permanente Northern California members beyond age, sex, residence, and number of outpatient visits. This was long before the implementation of Kaiser Permanente’s electronic medical record system, Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect, and the earlier implementation of clinical and administrative databases to capture information about health conditions for which members were seeking care and procedures/lab tests performed.
In 1993 and 1996, survey questionnaires were mailed to stratified random samples of 34,000 adult Health Plan members from 17 medical center service populations in the Northern California region. In 1999 and 2002, the sample size was increased to 40,000 from 18 medical center service populations, and in 2005 and 2008, to 42,000 from 19 medical center service populations. In 2011, there will still be 19 medical center service populations, but the sample size will be approximately 44,000 to counter the trend of decreasing response rate. While these seem like very large numbers, they represent a small fraction of the approximately 2.4 million adults in the Northern California Kaiser Permanente Health Plan membership.
While Kaiser Permanente’s electronic data capture about member health and service utilization has grown by leaps and bounds, the Member Health Survey, based on self-reported information obtained from a stratified random sample of members, remains the most comparable source of Kaiser Permanente Northern California population statistics to other health surveys based on self-reported data, such as the California Behavioral Risk Factor Survey, California Health Interview Survey, and National Health Interview Survey. As stated in the Survey Description, the Member Health Survey also captures information about demographic characteristics, health status, behavioral and psychosocial health risks, use of CAM and dietary supplements, Internet and email access, and health information and education modality preferences that is valuable for health research and service planning.