The Massachusetts Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA) partnered with MDR to conduct the 2024 Massachusetts Employer Survey (MES), a biennial initiative that has tracked employer-sponsored health insurance trends in the state since 2001. The survey provides critical insights into employer health plan offerings, employee eligibility and enrollment, and the broader health insurance landscape in Massachusetts. The 2024 MES was designed to reflect current workplace realities, including the rise of remote work and evolving health benefit structures, and to support CHIA’s mission of monitoring access, affordability, and quality in the state’s healthcare system.
MDR implemented a hybrid sampling strategy that combined a probability sample from the Dun & Bradstreet database with a non-probability panel of firms that had participated in the 2021 MES. The target population included firms with three or more employees either working in Massachusetts or working remotely but on Massachusetts payrolls. The sample was stratified by firm size and industry sector, resulting in 54 strata and a total sample of 14,286 firms. MDR used web scraping, commercial databases, and manual verification to identify the most appropriate contacts within each firm.
Data collection took place from April 9 to September 6, 2024, using a multi-mode approach that included email invitations, telephone outreach, and limited mail follow-up. MDR sent over 47,000 email invitations and reminders and made more than 39,000 recruitment and reminder phone calls. A total of 1,066 surveys were completed online, yielding a 55% completion rate and an 8% overall response rate. The 2024 survey instrument was updated to reflect current health insurance practices, with new questions on telemedicine, racial and ethnic workforce composition, and health reimbursement arrangements, and the removal of outdated COVID-19-related items.
MDR conducted extensive data cleaning and validation and developed firm-level, employee-level, and plan-level weights to support population-level analysis, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Dun & Bradstreet to adjust for sampling design and non-response.
Deliverables to CHIA included cleaned and weighted datasets at multiple levels, a detailed methodology report, and recommendations for future survey cycles. MDR’s work ensured that CHIA received high-quality, representative data to inform policy decisions and monitor trends in employer-sponsored health insurance across the Commonwealth.
The 2024 MES is notable for its methodological innovations, including the integration of web scraping to improve contact accuracy and the use of advanced imputation techniques to enhance data quality. These improvements contributed to stronger response rates and more reliable insights, reinforcing the MES as a vital tool for understanding the evolving health insurance landscape in Massachusetts.
