Tailored Strategies to Enhance Survey Response among Proxies of Deceased Patients

OBJECTIVE: To enhance proxy survey responses for deceased cancer patients. DATA SOURCES: Two waves of surveys about care experiences of cancer chemotherapy patients (used for a value-based purchasing initiative), collected November 2016 through March 2017. STUDY DESIGN: Surveys were mailed to deceased patients (for proxy response) in the untailored first survey wave, and using a tailored strategy in the second wave. We compared proxy responses for deceased patients with and without the tailored approach. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: A tailored survey approach improved the proxy response rate from 17.6 percent to 39.0 percent. CONCLUSIONS: Simple tailoring strategies can significantly enhance proxy response rates when surveying patients in a high mortality population. However, we were unable to address the impact of higher proxy response rates on response bias since we surveyed different patients in each wave.