The National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC) has announced that the CMS Home Health Quality Improvement Campaign (HHQI) will continue after July 31, 2011.
The goal of the HHQI Campaign is to improve the quality of care home health patients receive as measured by a reduction of avoidable hospitalizations and improvement in the management of oral medications. Throughout the campaign, a variety of materials as well as online communication and sharing tools have been and will continue to be available to Campaign participants. These include Best Practice Intervention Packages (BPIPs), which will be released quarterly to share effective strategies with home health care providers.
Campaign participants will also be able to set improvement targets and view rates related to the publicly reported acute care hospitalization and oral medication measures through a free target-setting tool at the Home Health STAR (Setting Targets Achieving Results) Web site.
According to NAHC, the second phase of the campaign was set to conclude at the end of July, but CMS has indicated that the HHQI movement will proceed into a third phase. As a result home health agencies will be able to continue to access free quality improvement resources at www.homehealthquality.org.
Before the next phase starts later this year (the details on what the third phase will entail has yet to be announced) home care agencies are asked to fill out a simple form and share input on how the campaign can improve. The HHQI National Campaign has created a brief three-question assessment that asks for insights, along with name, e-mail address and phone number. It can be filled out at: http://www.homehealthquality.org/hh/about/feedback/default.aspx.
The Home Care Alliance is a Local Area Network of Excellence (LANE), which means that the association is responsible for agency recruitment in Massachusetts and the dissemination of information and materials from the national campaign. For more information on the campaign, please visit www.homehealthquality.org/.
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