COVID-19 has severely affected nursing homes. As of now, over 139,270 residents and 2,155 nursing home staff have died from COVID-19. This post provides insight on the questions researchers are asking to understand the impact of nursing facility factors on COVID-19. A Perfect Storm The combination of a frail, aging population, close living quarters, and… Read More »
How is research on patient-centered transitional care going? A supplement on this topic funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) was recently published in Medical Care. Care transitions are “ripe with hazard,” as discussed in an editorial from Amy Berman. As pointed out by Berman, figuring out what works and what doesn’t is critical to… Read More »
What are the potential impacts of COVID-19 on health care utilization? How will changes in healthcare use impact quality measures? Researchers are asking many key questions to understand the impacts of COVID-19. It is clear that trends in healthcare use are changing. These changes will likely affect quality measure scores in the future. This is… Read More »
Nursing facilities have been in the center of the COVID-19 pandemic and experienced sweeping policy changes. The pace of change has made it difficult to keep track of each new policy, so this post summarizes the key shifts from January through May. Nursing facilities are attempting to protect residents by ramping up existing infection control… Read More »
Physicians and other providers are the gatekeepers for prescription medicines; they decide who, under what circumstances, and for how long someone takes one – or several – medicines. But how do physicians stay abreast of the latest research about the safety and efficacy of the medicines they prescribe? We set out to understand how they… Read More »
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has a set of “Compare” websites – Hospital Compare, Nursing Home Compare, Home Health Compare, etc.; consumers and policymakers can compare physicians, long-term care hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, hospice care, and dialysis facilities today, and other settings may follow. Together with their associated health care quality measurement… Read More »
In narrative medicine, the clinician seeks to understand a patient’s story of their illness and their value system. Narrative medicine helps clinicians establish an empathic and therapeutic relationship with a patient, ideally resulting in a person-centered treatment plan. Rita Charon coined that term and approach in 2001 and expanded on it in numerous subsequent publications. Several sessions… Read More »
In an effort to improve the validity and person-centeredness of the nursing home resident assessment tool (the Minimum Data Set, or MDS), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services introduced version 3.0 in October 2010. As a result, many of the measures and items health services researchers had grown accustomed to using in the MDS… Read More »
In the era of value-based care, caregivers and policymakers alike are intensely interested in strategies to reduce 30-day hospital readmissions. Researchers continue to offer up helpful tools in this effort. Recently published online ahead of print in Medical Care, Burke and colleagues make an important contribution with their article The Hospital Score Predicts Potentially Preventable 30-Day Readmissions… Read More »
Medical Care has recently published two papers on the topic of pressure ulcers — costly, painful, largely preventable infections associated with poorer quality care. In the first, from researchers at the University of Manitoba, York University, and the University of British Columbia, lead author Malcolm Doupe, PhD and colleagues focus on the risk of developing stage… Read More »
One of the primary goals of measuring and publicly reporting quality of care is to empower consumers to make informed health care decisions. Numerous national efforts, many initiated as a result of requirements in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, are underway to make information about quality of care available to the public. Despite… Read More »
If you had to find a nursing home for a loved one, would you pick an independent, non-profit facility over a facility that was affiliated with a large, for-profit chain? If you said yes, your instincts are good. Independent and non-profit nursing homes are rated higher by patients and their families on the experience of their care. Kai… Read More »