LTQA and the Integrating Care for Populations & Communities National Coordinating Center (ICPC NCC) are excited to co-host the 3rd Innovative Communities Summit, June 4-5, 2012 at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, DC.  The full agenda is now available for download, and registration is live.  Click here to learn more about the conference.

The Long-Term Quality Alliance (LTQA) today released a white paper that reveals that although the decision to go to the hospital is often made in long-term services and supports settings, there are no available validated measures to help long-term care organizations determine what is a preventable hospitalization. The paper makes recommendations for how Medicare, Medicaid, private payers and the long-term services and supports community can generate information, training and support to reduce preventable hospitalizations. Click Here to download the paper.

Frequent hospitalizations and complications that develop during hospital stays can have serious, negative consequences for chronically ill adults and older people who receive long-term services and supports at home or in assisted living or a nursing home. Initiatives created by the Affordable Care Act will create strong pressures, including decreased payment to hospitals, to reduce potentially preventable hospitalizations. These initiatives could greatly benefit chronically ill adults and older people by avoiding difficult care transitions and the negative consequences of potentially preventable hospital stays.

“Our literature search on potentially preventable hospitalizations to identify quality measures that would work for frail and chronically ill adults and older people found no appropriate measures that adequately distinguish which hospitalizations are potentially preventable for the population served by long-term services and supports organizations,” said Katie Maslow, scholar-in-residence at the Institute of Medicine and a co-author of the white paper.

“If we are going to link financial incentives to improved care for the LTQA population, we need to know how to measure quality,” said Joe Ouslander, MD, professor and senior associate dean for geriatric programs, Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, Florida Atlantic University, the other co-author. “We also need broad implementation of interventions that can improve the measures.”

The paper includes seven recommendations for the LTQA to pursue. These include:
• Defining preventable hospitalizations in general instead of by setting.
• Defining as precisely as possible the population receiving long-term services and supports.
• Beginning a process to develop appropriate measures or measure-based procedures to identify potentially preventable hospitalizations in the LTQA population.
• Advocating for studies of measures.
• Advocating with CMS for rigorous monitoring of programs designed to reduce preventable hospitalizations.
• Expanding education for clinicians who trigger hospitalizations.
• Advocating for expanded implementation of existing tools for reducing preventable hospitalizations.

“This report provides an excellent blueprint for the LTQA to improve transitions and tackle this problem that creates diminished outcomes and increases costs,” said Carol Raphael, chair of the Long-Term Quality Alliance and past CEO of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. “We have much work to do, but the solutions are available and we are passionate about actualizing them.”

The Quality Measurement Workgroup of the Long-Term Quality Alliance is please to announce the release of their first report on measurement opportunities and gaps in transitional care.  Click here to download the report.

Slides from LTQA’s 2012 Annual Meeting are now available.  Click here to access the slides.

Measure Applications Partnership (MAP) is a public-private partnership convened by the National Quality Forum (an LTQA member). MAP was created for the explicit purpose of providing input to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on the selection of performance measures for public reporting and performance-based payment programs. The draft Performance Measurement Coordination Strategy for Post-Acute Care and Long-Term Care report and its appendices are available for review and comment.  The report aims to enhance alignment across public and private initiatives by defining priorities and core measure concepts to harmonize measures and promote common goals across initiatives, highlighting the need for common data sources and health IT, and determining a pathway for improving measure application. All comments must be submitted by Wednesday, November 23, at 6:00 pm, ET.

LTQA’s 2nd Innovative Communities Summit gathered a variety of leaders to explore how the alliance can support Innovative Communities and how these communities can work together to improve care transitions and reduce unnecessary rehospitalizations. The wealth of knowledge and experience in evidence during this gathering was truly impressive. Summit participants represented 20 Innovative Communities, 20 federal agencies and 15 state and local governments. Five participants represented the philanthropic community. Seven consumers joined the summit, as did 32 providers of health care, long-term services and supports, and home and community-based services. We also welcomed 14 organizations representing health-care purchasers and payers, and 16 academicians whose area of expertise includes health policy.

In addition to these expert participants, LTQA was honored to introduce 11 presenters who interacted with one another and with summit participants during facilitated panels and small-group discussions.  The Summit was made possible by support from The Commonwealth Fund.  The final report from the Summit is now available and can be found by clicking here.

The ongoing debate over the federal budget and deficit reduction presents a balancing act for policy makers, as many compelling interests compete for scarce dollars. But for 10 million older adults and people with disabilities who need long-term services and supports, there is a “rebalancing act” in progress. The aim is to serve more people at home and in the community, and fewer people in institutions.

States grappling with constrained budgets, at a time when the aging and disability populations are growing rapidly, are actively engaged in this “rebalancing” between institution and home in the hope of delivering high quality long-term services and supports at lower cost.

Are there sufficient home- and community-based programs in all states to address the aging population? To help the growing number of adults with disabilities? How can incentives in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act be used to develop new approaches in home- and community-based services? How effective are existing federal initiatives to promote care in home- and community-based settings, such as the “Money Follows the Person” program? What can ongoing state efforts to promote community-based options tell us about the impact on costs, on promoting greater choice of settings and providers, and on adequate support for family caregivers?

To address these and related questions, the Alliance for Health Reform and The Commonwealth Fund sponsored an October 3 luncheon briefing.  The podcast of the briefing is now available online courtesy of Kaiser Family Foundation.  Click here to download the podcast and supporting materials.

Speakers:
Bob Hornyak, Administration on Aging
Cynthia Woodcock, Impaq and formerly Hilltop Institute
Carol Raphael, Visiting Nurse Service of New York

Moderators:
Mary Jane Koren, The Commonwealth Fund
Ed Howard, Alliance for Health Reform

AARP, The Commonwealth Fund and The SCAN Foundation invite you for lunch and discussion of a new report being released on September 8, 2011 from 11:30 AM – 2:30 PM: “Raising Expectations: A State Scorecard on Long-Term Services and Supports (LTSS) for Older Adults, People with Physical Disabilities and Family Caregivers.”

Developed by AARP’s Public Policy Institute with support from The Commonwealth Fund and The SCAN Foundation, the State LTSS Scorecard presents the first broad evaluation of how well states provide assistance to millions of adults who need help with daily activities.

States play a critical role in the care many people receive. The Scorecard ranks states by performance, identifies specific areas where each state can improve and highlights state policies that result in better performance. Speakers who will discuss Scorecard findings and address policy options include:

• Jennifer Burnett, Director, CMS Division of Community Systems Transformation
• Bruce Chernof, M.D., President and CEO, The SCAN Foundation
• Henry Claypool, Director, HHS Office on Disability
• Robert Hornyak, Acting Director, Center for Policy, Planning and Evaluation, Administration on Aging
• Bonnie Kantor-Burman, Director, Ohio Department of Aging
• Kathleen A. Kelly, Executive Director, Family Caregiver Alliance
• Mary Jane Koren, M.D., VP, The Commonwealth Fund
• Dawn Lambert, Connecticut Money Follows the Person Program Director
• Susan Reinhard, AARP SVP for Public Policy
• Martha Roherty, Executive Director, NASUAD
• Herb Sanderson, Associate State Director, AARP Arkansas

Dr. Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, claims hospital leaders need five skills to tackle the cost and quality issue: they need to “collect data to recognize failure and success; develop solutions to problems based on that data; implement solutions effectively; identify the most important projects; and lead the organization through the process.” The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) has worked with a small number of organizations to develop these skills that reduce costs while improving quality. After a one-year collaboration, these organizations are on track to save a collective $30 million.

How can your hospital emulate this success? Join the year-long Impacting Cost + Quality initiative, starting in September and benefit from three live meetings, monthly webinars, personalized coaching, and collective learning. During the year, your organization will be immersed in this content and will build the capability to: Identify cost reduction and quality improvement opportunities that will reduce operating expenses by at least 1% per year, Craft a disciplined performance improvement cycle and a financial model to quantify savings, Create a leadership plan to achieve strategic results, and build an effective engagement strategy for front-line staff and physicians.

To learn more about the IHI Leadership Initiative Impacting Cost and Quality, click here.

Recently, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched the Partnership for Patients initiative to dramatically improve patient safety across the country. This initiative will engage stakeholders from the private and public sectors to reduce healthcare acquired conditions and hospital readmissions. In an effort to assist and facilitate learning among hospital leaders, clinicians, healthcare providers, consumers, purchasers, health plans and states, HHS has requested the National Priorities Partnership (NPP), convened by the National Quality Forum, to launch the “Partnership for Patients – National Priorities Partnership Patient Safety Webinar Series.” 

 On Wednesday, June 6^th, 2011 will host its 2^nd Webinar, “Reducing Readmissions through Care Transitions.”  This webinar will discuss the goal of decreasing preventable complications, during a transition from one care setting to another, thereby reducing hospital readmissions by 20%.  Speakers for this webinar will be Mary Naylor, Professor in Gerontology, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, and Eric Coleman, Chief Medical Officer, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.  

To register for this webinar visit the NQF website.