Medicare Advantage plans offered by hospitals or health systems tend to provider better customer service than other health plans, new research suggests.
The study, published in Health Affairs, examines an exhaustive data set of vertically integrated Medicare Advantage contracts on the market between 2011 and 2015. These vertically integrated contracts — in which health plans were integrated with hospitals and health systems — were associated with generally higher average quality ratings than their nonintegrated equivalents.
One of the study's authors, health economist Austin Frakt, PhD, laid out the quality difference found in the study in a column for The New York Times: "Plans offered by insurers have average ratings of just over 3.5 stars for both nondrug and drug service. An average provider-offered plan has quality ratings that are about one-third of a star higher for both, after adjusting for factors that could confound the comparison, like socioeconomic status and the types and number of doctors where plans are offered."
The research showed provider-based health plans tended to score slightly better on clinical quality measures, like colorectal cancer screenings, according to Dr. Frakt's column. However, vertically integrated plans really excelled in providing better customer service than other plans.
Though the authors note the study only finds a correlation — not causation — between vertically integrated insurance plans and better customer service, they hypothesize that this relationship may exist because the consumer experience is more streamlined, data is more easily shared and incentives are aligned when providers and payers operate as one.
"Our findings provide reassurance that vertically integrated organizations perform as well as, if not better than, other firms on most CMS measures of care quality and enrollee satisfaction," the authors wrote.
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