UPDATE Weekly

Make plans today to join your colleagues for the fourth annual NCHCFA Summer Symposium. The three-day event will be August 26-28, 2015 at the Embassy Suites Resort at Kingston Plantation, Myrtle Beach, SC. Call the Embassy Suites Resort at (800) 876-0010 to reserve your overnight room. Use group code “HCF” to identify yourself as a NC Health Care Facilities Association Convention attendee! To make your reservation on-line, visit http://tinyurl.com/2015symposiumroomblock.

Please call the Association office at (919) 782-3827 with any questions. Brochures will be mailed to members in June!

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On May 7th, NCHCFA joined the American Health Care Association (AHCA) in rolling out the expansion of the Quality Initiative to further improve quality care in skilled nursing care centers. For the next three years, the Initiative will challenge member organizations to apply a systematic approach, such as the nationally recognized Baldrige Performance Excellence Framework, to achieve more ambitious targets in eight critical areas with a special focus on three priorities—improvements in organizational success; short-term/post-acute care; and long-stay/dementia care.

These areas are aligned with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)’ Quality Assurance/Performance Improvement (QAPI) program and federal mandates, such as the Five-Star and the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation (IMPACT) Act.

The goals of the Quality Initiative include new areas of focus for quality enhancement. The eight target areas and priorities are:

Priority: Improve Organizational Success by:

• Increasing staff stability by decreasing turnover among nursing staff by 15 percent or achieve and maintain turnover of less than 40 percent by March 2018;
• At least 25 percent of members measuring and reporting long-stay resident and family satisfaction and/or short-stay satisfaction using the Core-Q survey;
• Reduce the number of unintended health care outcomes by March 2018;

Priority: Improve Short-Term/Post-Acute Care by:

• Safely reducing the number of hospital readmissions within 30 days during a skilled nursing center stay by an additional 15 percent or achieve and maintain a low rate of 10 percent by March 2018;
• Improving discharge back to the community by 10 percent or achieve and maintain a high rate of at least 70 percent by March 2018;
• At least 25 percent of members adopting and using the mobility and self-care sections of the CARE tool and report functional outcome measures using LTC Trend TrackerSM;

Priority: Improve Long-Stay/Dementia Care by:

• Safely reducing the off-label use of antipsychotics in long-stay nursing center residents by an additional 10 percent by December 2015 and 15 percent by December 2016;
• Safely reducing hospitalizations among long-stay residents by 15 percent or achieve and maintain a low rate of 10 percent or less by March 2018.

AHCA will use CMS data and measures to track progress of the goals. Members can view their progress using AHCA’s LTC Trend TrackerSM, a web-based, data collection and benchmarking tool, and are encouraged to use this resource. Not sure if your organization uses LTC Trend TrackerSM? Please e-mail help@ltctrendtracker.com and request the name of your account administrator.

A number of other tools and resources are available to assist member organizations in accomplishing the goals of the Quality Initiative, including the AHCA National Quality Award Program.

On May 28th, from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM Eastern, AHCA Senior Vice President of Quality & Regulatory Affairs Dr. David Gifford, and AHCA/NCAL Quality Cabinet Co-Chairs Mary Ousley and Howie Groff, will lead a webinar entitled, “The Quality Initiative 2015-2018: What’s New & What it Means for You.” The Webinar is free for member organizations. For more information and to register, click here.

Visit http://www.ahcancal.org/quality_improvement/qualityinitiative/Pages/default.aspx for more information about the AHCA Quality Initiative.

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The next CMS Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNF)/Long Term Care (LTC) Open Door Forum is scheduled for Thursday, May 14, 2015 at 2:00 PM ET. Items planned to be discussed during this call are:

• Proposed SNF PPS Rule:
http://www.cms.gov/Newsroom/MediaReleaseDatabase/Fact-sheets/2015-Fact-sheets-items/2015-04-15.html
o Quality Reporting Program Proposed Rule Overview
o SNF Value Based Purchasing

• Electronic submission of staffing data announcement:
http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/NursingHomeQualityInits/Staffing-Data-Submission-PBJ.html

There will also be an open question and answer session.

To participate by phone, dial (800) 837-1935 and reference Conference ID 12753443. If you cannot attend the live conference, CMS will have an encore recording. Encore is an audio recording of this call that can be accessed by dialing (855) 859-2056 and entering the Conference ID beginning the following Monday. The recording expires after 3 business days.

For ODF schedule updates and E-Mailing List registration, visit http://www.cms.gov/OpenDoorForums

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We are excited about the number of nursing homes that have decided to participate in the Alliant Quality National Nursing Home Quality Care Collaborative (NNHQCC). Alliant Quality would like to invite each of you to attend a brief (30-minute) SPACE- Kick-Off Session in June. If you have not already completed a participation agreement and do not want to be left out, please complete the agreement and return to nancy.fendler@alliantquality.org.

There are four opportunities, please click on the dates below to register.

Wednesday, June 3, 2015:

• Quality Net Meeting Invite Participant June 3, 10:00 AM-10:30 AM
• Quality Net Meeting Invite Participant June 3, 2:00 PM-2:30 PM

Thursday, June 4, 2015:

• Quality Net Meeting Invite Participant June 4, 10:00 AM- 10:30 AM
• Quality Net Meeting Invite Participant June 4, 2:00 PM-2:30 PM

ABOUT ALLIANT QUALITY
Alliant Quality is the Medicare Quality Innovation Network (QIN)-Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) for North Carolina. Under contract with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Alliant Quality invites your nursing home to participate in a collaborative designed to ensure that every nursing home resident receives the highest quality of care. Specifically, the Nursing Home Quality Care Collaborative (NNHQCC) will strive to instill quality and performance improvement practices, eliminate healthcare acquired conditions, and dramatically improve resident satisfaction.

The Collaborative offers an exciting opportunity to learn from high performing nursing homes regarding their processes as they pertain to consistent/permanent staff assignment, teamwork and communications, leadership, regulatory compliance, clinical models, and quality of life indicators. The Collaborative aligns national nursing home quality initiatives and partnerships such as the Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes Campaign, The Partnership to Improve Dementia Care, and Quality Assurance Performance Improvement (QAPI). Targeted focus areas will include increasing mobility, decreasing unnecessary use of antipsychotics in residents with dementia, decreasing potentially avoidable hospitalizations and decreasing healthcare acquired infections and conditions.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND
Participants in the Alliant Quality National Nursing Home Quality Care Collaborative (NNHQCC) ~ Southern Partners Action Collaborative for Excellence (SPACE)

If you are ready to register, click here for the Participation Agreement and fax or e-mail it back to Nancy Fendler. For more details, e-mail Nancy at nancy.fendler@alliantquality.org or reach out to her at (678) 527-3679.

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The “Updated LEIE” (List of Excluded Individuals and Entities) database file reflects all OIG exclusion and reinstatement actions up to, and including, those taken in April 2015. This new “Updated LEIE” is a complete database file containing all exclusions currently in effect. Individuals and entities that have been reinstated to the federal health care programs are not included in this file.

All updated files are posted at http://oig.hhs.gov/exclusions/exclusions_list.asp.

Instructional videos explaining how to use the on-line database and the downloadable files are available as follows:

• On-line Database Video: http://oig.hhs.gov/exclusions/online.asp.
• Downloadable Database Video: http://oig.hhs.gov/exclusions/download.asp.

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Register today for the North Carolina Health Care Facilities Association’s “Audit Survival in Long-Term Care/The Roadmap to Success.” This program will provide strategies for managing the people, records, and processes for responding to an auditor’s request for records and appealing denials. The role each person plays during this process includes coordination, preparation, documentation, and tracking. Preventing denials in the first place is part of a comprehensive compliance program as an internal QA function.

Topics include, but not limited to the following:

• Audits impacting nursing homes
• Who may audit you
• How to respond to audit requests
• Appealing audits
• The parts your employees play
• How to reduce/prevent audits

This program will be presented by The Polaris Group on May 28th, 2015 at the Doubletree By Hilton in Greensboro, NC! Online registration is available by logging onto the Association Web site at http://www.NursingHomesNC.com and clicking on “Audit Survival in Long-Term Care/The Roadmap to Success.” Don’t miss it! Space is limited!

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This book covers 28 challenging cases that cover pivotal issues that most health care administrators and managers are likely to encounter at some point in their work – quality improvement, strategic planning, ethical dilemmas, organizational dynamics, cost-benefit analyses, resource utilization, and more. Providing an exceptional framework for decision-making and debate, Cases in Health Services Management is an outstanding casebook that provokes thought and discussion.

To order, visit http://www.AHCApublications.org or call (800) 321-0343.

Product # 8248
AHCA Members (on-line price) $64.95

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Important information for residents and families… This brochure outlines what physical restraints are, when they should be used, rules and regulations concerning restraints, and making decisions about using them. To order, e-mail your request to Amy Suggs at amys@nchcfa.org.

• NCHCFA Member: $30.00 per 100 brochures plus tax and shipping
• Non-Members: $60.00 per 100 brochures plus tax and shipping

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94-year-old man finishes college after starting 75 years ago

http://news.yahoo.com/94-old-man-finishes-college-starting-75-years-155021184.html

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The Sun is so dense that it accounts for 99% of our entire solar system’s mass.

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