Thank you for your interest in participating in this important new research project funded by the national Alzheimer’s Association, “New Quality of Life Measures to Improve Dementia Care in Nursing Homes.” For more information on the study’s research goals click here.
By agreeing to participate in this study, your facility will benefit by being the first to have access to new dementia-specific quality of life measures and benchmarks developed specifically for this population. You will also have access to related resident-level reports and on-going technical assistance in using this information to improve outcomes and quality of care for this growing population. These new quality measures and reports will be readily accessible via a web-based application, EQUIP for Quality ® . Please be aware that indicating your willingness to participate does not necessarily mean that you will be selected, but the study relies on a large number of participating nursing homes. Based on responses, we plan to select a large sample of nursing homes that are representative of size, geography, profit status, and other provider characteristics..
Your participation in this cutting-edge research will not only benefit your facility and Alzheimer’s/Dementia residents, it will benefit long term care and advance the science of quality measurement and improvement. Through this research, we hope to show that using readily available clinical informatics technology can improve the quality of care for the increasing number of dementia residents in nursing homes. The new measures will address important under-identified quality of life issues specific to dementia residents including undiagnosed pain, greater than expected functional decline, overuse of antipsychotic medication and worsening urinary incontinence.
Additional benefits to participation include staff training in using and interpreting dementia-specific Quality Measures and key risk factors, using data to plan targeted remediation and evaluate changes, and developing and changing care processes specific to your dementia residents based on the information. All participants will have immediate and timely access to computerized reports based on their facility’s most current MDS data during the study period, as well as extensive benchmark data.
Before making a decision, you will want to carefully consider what participation will involve.
All participating facilities will be asked to sign an agreement assuring executive support for the duration of the project (which will be about one year for this portion of the study), willingness to dedicate the required time of your nursing staff throughout the project, and a commitment to ensure and help train any new key staff, using materials we provide.
Participating facilities will be asked to allow 2 to 3 nursing staff (e.g. Director of Nursing, MDS Coordinator, Quality Improvement Director) to participate in one 1-hour web-based training seminar. A highly qualified Quality Improvement Analyst/RN will conduct the training and provide your staff with the information they need to access, implement and interpret the new EQUIP measures and reports. These staff will also be expected to participate in quarterly conference calls that will last no longer than one hour and will address questions/problems and share best practices in using the new QMs and reports.
Participating staff will be required to periodically complete a short web-based survey describing how they are implementing the program and any barriers encountered. Note: The project staff will be able to monitor and track actual usage of the reports by your facility staff in order to evaluate levels of improvement relative to levels of usage of the informatics reports.
About ten facilities showing the greatest improvement in QM rates for the outcomes tested will be asked to participate in a telephone interview where more in-depth information will be collected, such as “best practices” that contributed to successful use of the data in improving outcomes and quality of care.
If you wish to participate, please click here to complete and submit the Participant Response Sheet. We will notify you shortly thereafter as to whether you were selected for the study based on our sampling criteria.
We are very excited about this project because of the lack of good quality of life and care measures to identify serious quality issues for this growing population—the existing quality measures tend to hide these issues. This research can make a major contribution to improving the quality of care for dementia residents in nursing homes nationwide using innovative continuous quality improvement measures.
If you need additional information, do not hesitate to contact Linda Spokane or me at 518-449-2707. We hope that you elect to be part of this exciting project.
Sincerely,
Christie L. Teigland, Ph.D., Project Director
Director, Healthcare Economics and Statistics, NYAHSA
