Even a short delay in diagnosis and treatment can send them downhill in a hurry. The health of your nursing home patients can be very fragile. Not only do they need the right medical supplies and equipment, they need them at the right time. Your nursing homes should provide your staff with the right medical supplies and equipment to execute on those best practices that produce the best health outcomes for your patients. They must have the competencies to execute on those best practices, and you need to validate their skills and knowledge on a regular basis.ĥ. Your staff needs to know what those measures are and what the best practices are that map to those measures. It picked them because it believes that how you do on those measures reflects the quality of the care that you provide to your patients. The CMS didn’t pick the 17 measures out of a hat. Things like nutrition, mobility, socialization and independence can be just as important as the drugs that they’re taking.Ĥ. You’re focusing on medical aspects of their care and on all the other things that can affect their health status and health outcomes. That’s the definition of patient-centric care. By including everyone in your QAPI plan, you’re taking a holistic view of your patients. Anyone who influences a patient’s care directly or indirectly must be on board.ģ. That includes your dietary, housekeeping and maintenance staffs. You should cover everyone in your quality assurance and performance improvement, or QAPI, plan. Quality improvement and quality measure reporting isn’t just for your nurses or your nursing assistants. When I say everyone who works at your nursing home, I mean everyone. If they show that it’s important to them, it will be important to everyone who works and stays at your nursing home.Ģ. They need to convey their priorities to staff and residents by regularly engaging and interacting with them. Quality improvement and quality measure reporting must be a priority for your executives and your senior management. Culture starts at the top, and your nursing home is no exception. Improving performance on these measures can result in a higher star rating for your nursing home.īelow are five overarching strategies or tactics your nursing home can use to move the needle in the right direction on all 17 measures.ġ. Ten measures apply to long-stay residents, or nursing home patients whose stays are longer than 100 days seven measures apply to short-stay residents, or nursing home patients whose stays are 100 days or less. There are 17 measures in the quality domain. Five ways to improve your quality measures Not just to your star rating but to whom it should matter most: your patients. It’s clear that what your nursing home does to improve its scores on its quality measures really does matter. A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that patients who go to skilled-nursing facilities with higher star ratings have lower mortality rates, spend fewer days in the nursing home and have fewer hospital readmissions. As a result, how you do on your quality measures can have a big effect on your star rating one direction or the other.Īnd star ratings do matter. The things that you have to do to meet it fall across a wide range. By comparison, the quality measures domain is much more variable. But they are less variable than the quality measures domain: the things you have to do to meet them fall within a narrow range. The health inspection and staffing domains certainly are as important as the quality measures domain. The other two domains are the health inspection domain, which is how well you do on your three most recent health inspections, and the staffing domain, which is how well you meet the CMS’ standards for staffing your nursing home with qualified nurses, aides and other caregivers. You can earn as many as five stars based on how well you perform in those three domains. You can, too.Īs you know, quality measures are one of three “domains” that the CMS uses to decide how many stars your nursing home gets from the agency’s star rating program. But many of your peers are finding new and creative ways to improve the care that they provide to their residents. You may think that you’ve done all you can to meet them. If your nursing home is looking for new ways to improve its star rating from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a good place to start is your quality measures.
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