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Texas Children’s Health Plan Highlights Patient Communication
Date: December 2, 2024
Attention: All Providers
Call to action: Texas Children’s Health Plan (TCHP) would like to highlight the topic of patient communication this month with our providers. One aspect of patient communication, Motivational Interviewing, has been known to aid in promoting healthy habits and optimizing self-care. “Health coaching, its origin from motivational interviewing, enhances patient self-management of chronic conditions by improving patient compliance and outcomes, and reducing costs.”
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19745624/
TCHP previously published a similar provider alert titled, Texas Children’s Promotes Positive Adolescent Health available here where we discuss the importance of communication with adolescent patients and encourage providers to complete an online Health and Human Services Commission course offering.
Background information: Overall, year over year improvement was made to become closer or surpass the National Benchmarks set on the member experience surveys. Based on the 2024 CAHPS and ECHO Member Experience surveys, there is a trend that patients feel that the time spent with their doctor was of low quality. Please reference this table for detailed results from the 2024 CAHPS and ECHO Surveys.
| Measure | 2024 CAHPS Rates | National CAHPS Benchmark | 2024 ECHO Rates | National ECHO Benchmark |
| Patients felt doctors listened carefully | 95.4% | 95.1% | 86.2% | 89.6% |
| Patients felt doctors explained things in an understandable way | 92.7% | 93.9% | 86.7%  | 91.4% |
| Patients felt respected by their doctor for what they had to say | 96.0% | 96.5% | 91.8% | 93.0% |
| Patients felt that they spent enough time with their doctor | 84.3% | 89.1% | 80.5% | 88.6% |
| How Well Doctors Communicate Composite Result | 92.1% | 93.6% | 88.0% | 88.7% |
How this impacts providers: It is important to remember that it is not about the length of time spent with the patient, but the quality of that time spent with patients. Welcome to review TCHP’s Survey Readiness provider toolkit and Patient Experience tips that can help to enhance provider patient communication.
In addition, to enhance patient communication for our members,TCHP strongly encourages provider’s participation in a CE/CME course focused on Motivational Interviewing offered by Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) available here. The learning objectives include the following:
- Assess how motivational interviewing (MI) differs from traditional provider-patient communication and why it can effectively motivate positive behavior changes.
- Integrate MI best practices into routine clinical encounters to promote healthy habits and optimum self-care.
Next step for Providers:As learned in the course, providers should integrate best practices in communication to promote trust, positivity, and comfort in discussions in the provider-patient relationship.
Patient Communication and Experience Resources:
- Patient Experience Tips
- Survey Readiness- The Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) is a set of surveys that ask patients to rate their health care experiences
Find other useful resources here as well, https://www.texaschildrenshealthplan.org/providers/provider-resources
If you have any questions, please email Provider Relations at: providerrelations@texaschildrens.org
For access to all provider alerts visit: www.texaschildrenshealthplan.org/provideralerts