In the News: Home Health Quality Improvement Organization Support Center (HH QIOSC)

Quality has taken center stage in health care delivery throughout 2007 and into 2008 and the Home Health Quality Improvement (HHQI) National Campaign has been a major influence in this initiative.  The overall goal for this National Campaign was to create a shared vision among home care providers of reducing hospitalizations.  The approach spanned the year, and throughout the course of the year, best practice intervention tools and resources have been made available.  All packages use a multi-disciplinary approach and include resources, guidelines, case studies, and best practice education.

A recent reminder from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) alerted home health providers that the National Campaign’s February 2008 Transitional Care Coordination package is currently available.  This is the final package planned in a series of twelve packages.  Other available topics include: hospitalization risk assessment, patient emergency plan, medication management, phone monitoring and frontloading visits, teletriage, telemonitoring, immunizations, physician relationships, fall prevention, patient safe management and disease management.  All twelve months of these packages are free and available by accessing the website: www.homehealthquality.org.  These packages are designed for ease of use and application within the home health agency and providers have the benefit of downloading for use throughout the year.  These resources are such that they can be easily integrated into the provider organization’s annual inservice education offering.

This 12-month focus on quality involved key stakeholders from the home health and hospital provider setting and included key physicians, as well as state and national organizations.  Free inservice education providing continuing nursing education [CNE] units for RNs and certificates of participation for therapists has also been available through online education offerings.

Overall more than 5500 home health agencies are registered participants in this endeavor. Participants were widespread across the nation. Each month a specific agency is selected as the Best Practice Agency of the month.  The selected agencies represent diversity in structure and geography and are noted, along with their best practice initiative, on the website.  The widespread geography represented by these twelve agencies is in keeping with the national focus of this campaign.

Pennsylvania associations, i.e. Quality Insights of Pennsylvania, the Medicare Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) for Pennsylvania served as the Home Health Quality Improvement Organization Support Center (HH QIOSC) to spearhead this project.  This group worked closely with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid’s Office of Clinical Standards and Quality (OCSQ) in coordination of this project.  In addition, these groups worked together in the release of the best practice packages.

References/Resources:

www.homehealthquality.org/hh

www.medqic.org