Nursing Home Quality Improvement Questionnaire

Nursing Home Providers Given Opportunity to Participate

_{in CMS’ Landmark Quality Improvement Initiative}

You have been randomly selected to provide input for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement (QAPI) initiative. Your answers will help shape the direction and content of the QAPI tools and resources provided by CMS to all nursing homes.

CMS is giving nursing home providers the opportunity to participate in a bold, new quality improvement initiative mandated through the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act requires CMS to “establish standards relating to quality assurance and performance improvement” (QAPI) and “provide technical assistance (TA) to facilities on the development of best practices” for QAPI.

CMS QAPI Initiatives:

• Five Elements: CMS has established the following key concepts that are found throughout effective quality systems: Design and Scope; Governance and Leadership; Feedback, Data Systems, and Monitoring; Performance Improvement Projects; and Systematic Analysis and Systemic Action.

 QAPI Tools and Resources: CMS, in collaboration with their contractors, University of Minnesota (UM) and subcontractor Stratis Health (SH), are in the process of identifying and designing effective QAPI tools, templates and resources for nursing homes.

 Technical Assistance (TA): CMS contractors will test QAPI tools, resources, and approaches to providing TA in a multi-year demonstration project with a small group of nursing homes. These tools and resources will be made available to all nursing homes following testing.

• The Nursing Home Quality Improvement Questionnaire: CMS’ contractor, Abt Associates, Inc., and their subcontractor, the Colorado Foundation for Medical Care are designing a questionnaire to identify the quality systems and processes nursing homes currently have in place, as well as assess the extent to which these systems and processes function to help nursing homes recognize and address quality issues. This information will help us and our contractors refine the QAPI components.

The Nursing Home Quality Improvement Questionnaire will be administered to a representative sample of 4,200 randomly selected nursing homes in two waves:

August, 2012	First wave of data collection	Objective	Establish a baseline of QAPI practices in nursing homes, and gather information on the challenges and barriers to implementing effective QAPI programs
August, 2013	Second wave of data collection	Objective	Collect data to assess the development of QAPI systems, and to determine what types of TA to make available to nursing homes in the future as well as the potential impact of TA in advancing QAPI in nursing homes

Nursing home providers participating in the data collection effort will be given the option of completing an electronic questionnaire available via the internet or a hard copy mailed directly to their facility. The questionnaire will take approximately 20 minutes to complete, and nursing homes participating in the data collection will not be identified by name or any other identifying information.

Your participation in this survey effort is crucial to the goals of CMS in aligning QAPI TA with provider needs.

CMS is being supported in this effort through partnership with the following organizations: