It is vital for nursing homes to measure the quality of care, but the data gathered must be more accurate than the current data sets available, as the quality of care depends on how the data are collected snf metrics. Nursing home quality metrics, when applied correctly, can improve the quality of care provided to residents. The most common metrics used by nursing home quality systems are the number of days in-patient who received scheduled care, number of out-patient visits, number of admissions, number of discharges, number of residents who had documented communication with the patient, and others.
These data are valuable because they show trends over time. However, to understand quality metrics, even more, there are many other quality metrics that need to be measured, such as time served per resident, days spent in the nursing home on level one floor, number of residents who received instruction from a registered nurse during their first level of care, number of nurses who attended a master level nursing program, the number of residents who had documented direct patient instruction or other supervision, and many more.
Quality Improvement
Nursing home quality Innovation Network (NHLN), which is funded by Medicare and is run by the Center for Quality Alternatives in Washington, D.C., has developed a series of metrics to measure quality in nursing home environments. These metrics can be used by communities as a way of measuring their performance on what was already known to be a good way of managing quality in nursing home environments.
Some examples of the metrics included in NHLN’s benchmarking program levels of bedside time and incident frequency, staff turnover rate, number of discharges per resident, quality indicators for staff-to-resident ratio, use of scheduling software, outcomes for out-of-hospital care, and others. To conduct surveys on these metrics, log on to Leading Aging Quality Metrics, choose a metric from the Tools section, click Readings and Answers, and select a metric for a particular topic from the drop-down menu. Then click Readings to return to the NHLN website.
Final Words
Other websites offer services similar to those offered by the hockey league’s team site. One such website, Quality Rank, offers visitors the ability to rank nursing homes according to a variety of quality measures, including ratings on service, quality of life, and overall satisfaction with the quality of care provided in the facility. To compile this ranking, the site uses a multivariate quality indicator, which may include data on bedside manner and incident frequency, patient-to-resident ratios, and staffing percentages. This website also offers resources for comparing expected outcomes for various measures of quality and using them to construct quality improvement metrics for the organization.