AMGA, Avatar Solutions partner to provide patient satisfaction services

The American Medical Group Association (AMGA) today announced a partnership venture with Avatar Solutions to provide enhanced services for its Patient Satisfaction Benchmarking (PSAT) Program. As part of this partnership, AMGA will offer CG-CAHPS surveys for members, and results will be automatically submitted to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to meet current and future regulatory requirements. Reporting CG-CAHPS patient experience data will be mandatory for many medical groups and healthcare systems starting in 2015. The announcement was made at the AMGA 2015 Annual Conference, March 24-26 at Caesars Palace.

AMGA now will be providing expanded custom reporting capability in addition to its existing PSAT Program services. AMGA's PSAT Program provides a tool to comprehensively evaluate and benchmark patient satisfaction, and the new partnership with Avatar will enable it to also provide services relevant to the CG-CAHPS survey. Groups that want to use the current PSAT Program will continue to have that option available to them. AMGA members that choose to collect CG-CAHPS information through Avatar will also have the option to include AMGA's PSAT Survey items as part of the overall surveying and reporting framework.

"We are excited about being able to offer our members expanded services for reporting to CMS," said Donald W. Fisher, Ph.D., president and chief executive officer for AMGA. "AMGA has always been a leader in providing benchmarking services to enable healthcare providers to enhance patient care and improve efficiencies in care delivery. Our new partner, Avatar Solutions, submitted over one third of all nationally reported CG-CAHPS data in 2014. We look forward to their contributions to the success of our member medical groups and health systems."

Mike Sinoway, CEO of Avatar Solutions, commented on the impact of the partnership: "Over the next three years, the mandatory deployment of CG-CAHPS metrics will change the behavior of physician groups. We are working closely with the AMGA to ensure that this change is driven by the needs of physicians and patients, and not the needs of the reporting agencies or the entrenched survey industry. The AMGA/Avatar partnership provides physician groups with more care for less cost."

AMGA and Avatar Solutions will be making announcements about product offerings and rollout later in 2015.