MGMA

Medical Group Management Association is the nation's principal industry association for the medical group practice profession. MGMA members manage 12,500 organizations representing 270,000 practicing physicians. Its members include healthcare executives, administrators, board members, and other industry professionals.

As part of its mission to support the continuous improvement of medical group practice professionals and their organizations, MGMA conducts extensive industry research, including surveys to gather critical practice management data from its members. The resulting analysis is used to define performance benchmarks and trends of key industry metrics which MGMA members can compare to their own practices to make them more successful.

For many years MGMA has used paper surveys requiring a great deal of operational support for production, distribution, collection and analysis of survey results. With medical practices under increasing pressure to control and rationalize their operating costs, practice managers have demanded quicker turnaround and more detailed analysis. In recent years, it became increasingly clear that a paperless, web-enabled system would accelerate the survey-report cycle, reduce costs and provide many advantages to MGMA and its members.

After a thorough review of commercial software options, MGMA determined that a custom, Web-based survey system would be required to meet their needs. They retained Amadeus Consulting to design and develop the system with a large-scale, multi-phase development effort.

MGMA's survey system is now in production with immediate cost savings and logistical advantages throughout the program in administration, distribution, data entry, analysis and reporting. Online surveys enable real-time validation and verification of responses, ensuring the quality and integrity of survey data. The accelerated survey cycle, from survey creation to published results and analysis, will provide more current industry data to MGMA members.

Online reporting tools will be available to participants including easy access to complete historical results and trend analysis. This has eliminated the need for MGMA to use a complex statistical modeling program and allows their analysts to extract meaningful information quickly without advanced programming skills.

Many advanced custom features were developed to assist MGMA administrators with all aspects of program operations including:

• A feature-rich environment for managing multiple survey projects, monitoring status, solicitation tracking, response intake operations and data editing processes
• Custom survey builder tool for design, formatting, previewing, managing versions and writing custom help text, including a built-in WYSIWIG HTML editor
• Validation of responses based on custom formulas with multiple criteria, and control over answer ranges and error messages
• Advanced logic for comparison of similar questions across historical survey results and validation of results including flagging of statistical outliers
• Branching logic for alternative questions based on custom formulas
• Matrix-style questions for collecting information on multiple individuals with looping through repeated question sequences for optimized work flow
• Downloadable Excel spreadsheets for filling in and uploading answers
• Ability to define date ranges for survey projects during which responses are accepted
• Validation of survey participant identity and their organization
• Integration with MGMA's CRM system for validation of participant contact information

The system also provides survey participants with:

• A survey portal for participants to submit data, obtain information about the surveys and results including benchmark data and reports
• Powerful, interactive reporting with advanced data visualization

The successful development, implementation and adoption of the new survey system spurred new product development in areas of encounter-level data and interactive data analysis.