June 30 , 2007

Support ANCOR's Home & Community Based Services (HCBS) Quality Initiative
By Sean Kinsella, Director of Quality Initiatives, Dakota Communities

If your organization is in the throws of pursuing a quality initiative, you have noticed that obtaining nationally comparable satisfaction results is a difficult task. Often, organizations must rely on data results from other industries, such as nursing home or hospice care.

ANCOR is teaming up with Deyta, a provider of performance management systems, to embark on an initiative to create quality measurements, called the Performance Excellence Initiative. This service allows participants to reliably judge their performance on defined quality indicators and performance standards over time and compare their standards to other member organizations.

The impetus behind this initiative is the result of several reports. In 2001 the Institute of Medicine’s Crossing the Quality Chasm report highlighted the wide variety of quality that exists in the American health care system. In 2003 CMS awarded grants to 19 states to enhance their quality management of HCBS.

Out of this initiative it was reported that HCBS waiver programs’ staffing is modest and lack the staff necessary for quality management. As a result “states look to the significant infrastructure that has been developed to improve nursing facility quality and believe that similar federal investment will be needed to assure adequate capacity to do what many consider the more difficult task of monitoring in-home care,” Booth et al. (2005).

As we know, nursing home care is not the same business as HCBS care and support. The onus is on providers to proactively demonstrate that our existing practices can be aligned to create a good quality management structure; that nursing home standards for quality would be ill-fitted when applied to HCBS programs.

The ANCOR and Deyta initiative, open to all ANCOR members, offers the opportunity to present to CMS a quality system within HCBS programs. This could significantly impact the standards that CMS is projected to release in 2010 for the HCBS programs.

The Performance Excellence Initiative is already underway. Phase 2 of the project is starting and ANCOR is looking for providers that are willing to participate and share the cost of validating this new quality metric.

The more who participate, the less it will cost participants. Please get involved. Contact Kari Amidon at ANCOR, regarding the Performance Excellence Initiative, at 1-703-535-7850 ext 115.