Behavioral Health Access-to-Care Survey for Services Provided in 2012

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (Blue Cross NC), in conjunction with our Physician Advisory Group, has established access-to-care standards to monitor the accessibility of behavioral health care services for our members enrolled in our PPO (Preferred Provider Organization) products.  Additionally, Blue Cross NC is an accredited participant of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and is subject to a set of demanding standards and performance measures. 

As part of Blue Cross NC’s accreditation with NCQA, we are required to collect and annually analyze data that measures access-to-care for behavioral health care services. Therefore, Blue Cross NC has designed a survey to help us identify the time-frames applied to appointment availability for Blue Cross NC PPO members when they seek to access behavioral health care services within our PPO provider network. 

The survey results will be analyzed by Blue Cross NC to measure performance on three specific standards among our PPO network behavioral health providers:

• Care access for a non-life-threatening emergency within six hours
• Urgent care access within 48 hours
• Appointment wait-time for a routine office visit (scheduled within 10 business days of an appointment request)

We need your assistance!  If your behavioral health care practice provides services to Blue Cross NC's PPO membership, we ask you to participate in the survey.  The survey is brief and shouldn’t take you more than four minutes to complete.  You can access the survey online at:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/care-access_Blue Cross NC-PPO

Thank you for your time and input. We appreciate your cooperation to help us gain this necessary member-access information to share with NCQA.