The Affordable Care Act of 2010 required the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to establish regulations in Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement (QAPI) and provide technical assistance to nursing homes to help them develop best practices to comply with the forthcoming regulations.
CMS defines QAPI as “an initiative that goes beyond the current Quality Assessment and Assurance (QAA) provision, and aims to significantly expand the intensity and scope of current activities in order to not only correct quality deficiencies (quality assurance), but also to put practices in place to monitor all nursing home care and services to continuously improve performance.”
QAPI programs should be based on the following five elements.
- Design and scope
- Governance and leadership
- Feedback, data systems and monitoring
- Performance improvement projects
- Systematic analysis and systematic action
Click here if you’d like to learn more about the five elements as described in a CMS fact sheet.
CMS has established online toolkits to help nursing homes prepare. However, the central requirements of the forthcoming QAPI regulations – namely, “a systematic, comprehensive, and data-driven approach to maintaining and improving safety and quality” – will remain challenging for nursing homes that do not have in-house expertise or infrastructure for advanced data analytic techniques, such as forecasting, root cause analysis, and alerts. NexulHealth products streamline the QAPI data analysis requirements using its state-of-the-art analytic platform that connects your EMR, MDS, and even claims data to provide a full picture of the care quality your residents receive before, during, and after a stay.
