UPDATE Weekly

UPDATE will not be published on December 27th, 2017, but will resume its normal schedule on January 3rd, 2018. The staff of the North Carolina Health Care Facilities Association wishes you Happy Holidays!

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Register today to attend the NCHCFA Annual Convention and Expo January 28 – 31, 2018, at the Sheraton Greensboro Hotel at Four Seasons/Joseph S. Koury Convention Center in Greensboro, NC! Call the Sheraton at (800) 242-6556 to make your room reservation. Identify that you are with “NC Health Care Facilities Association 2018 Convention” to receive the group discounted rate. Don’t miss the opportunity to earn up to 16.5 hours of educational credit for North Carolina Nursing Home Administrators, as well as up to 15.5 hours of Nursing CE credit! The advanced registration deadline is Friday, January 12th. Click here to register.

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The American Health Care Association (AHCA) has put together a summary of the recent changes to the RoP. Members can learn more about the finalized version of the State Operations Manual Appendix PP- Guidance for Long Term Care Facilities, which became effective on November 28th and contains interpretive guidance (IG) for Phase 1 and 2 RoP, by reviewing the full list of changes and downloading the summary of notable revisions AHCA put together.

Members are encouraged to submit technical corrections or concerns about the IG in the Appendix PP either to AHCA’s Sara Rudow or directly to CMS.

Members can access additional RoP resources, including a new Webinar series for owners and CEOs about these regulations on the RequirED section of ahcancalED and AHCA’s RoP Webpage.

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On April 1, 2018, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will start mailing Medicare cards with new Medicare Beneficiary Identifiers (MBIs) to everyone with Medicare. The MBI will replace the Social Security Number (SSN)-based Health Insurance Claim Number for transactions like billing, eligibility status, and claim status after a transition period.

You must be ready to accept the MBI beginning April 1st. People new to Medicare after April 1st will only get a card with the MBI.

• Get ready to use the new MBI Format. Ask your billing and office staff if your system(s) will be ready to accept the 11 digit alpha numeric MBI. If you use vendors to bill Medicare, ask them about their MBI practice management system changes and make sure they are ready.
• Consider automatically accepting the new MBI from the remittance advice (835) transaction.
• Prepare to process Railroad Retirement Board (RRB) claims: Ensure your staff can identify the RRB Medicare card; program your system to send these patients’ claims to the Specialty Medicare Administrative Contractor (the MBI itself will not indicate it is a RRB beneficiary).
• Make and internally test changes to your practice management systems and business processes before April 2018.
• Sign up for your Medicare Administrative Contractor’s portal now, so you can use the provider MBI look-up tool starting in June 2018.
• Subscribe to the weekly MLN Connects newsletter for updates and new information.
• Attend the CMS quarterly calls to learn more. CMS announces the calls in MLN Connects.

For More Information:

• Fact Sheet
• Overview Webpage
• Provider Webpage

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The North Carolina Health Care Facilities Association would like to thank our 2018 Gold Convention Hosts for supporting the upcoming Annual Convention & Expo. Be sure to visit them on Tuesday, January 30th during EXPO 2018 – NCHCFA National Best Bowl: Blue Ridge Pharmacy, Equinox Ventures Group, Healthcare Services Group, Medipack Pharmacy, NH Med Services, Poyner Spruill LLP, Remedi SeniorCare, and Southern Pharmacy Services.

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The North Carolina Health Care Facilities Association would like to thank our 2018 Gold Convention Host for supporting the upcoming Annual Convention & Expo. Be sure to visit TridentCareRX on Tuesday, January 30th during EXPO 2018 – NCHCFA National Best Bowl.

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To obtain a copy of the minutes from the Business Meeting held on Monday, February 27, 2017 at the Sheraton Four Seasons/Joseph S. Koury Convention Center, Greensboro, NC, please click here.

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Make plans today to attend the NCHCFA Annual Convention and Expo January 28 – 31, 2018. The meeting will be held at the Sheraton Greensboro Hotel at Four Seasons/Joseph S. Koury Convention Center, Greensboro, NC. You spoke and we listened! Don’t miss the opportunity to welcome back Dr. Dale Henry. Dr. Henry spoke at the 2017 Annual Convention & Expo and was the highest rated overall speaker with a 100% satisfaction rating. Countless members requested that we bring him back. Additional comments about his program include:

“The Sixth Sense was by far one of the best programs I have ever attended. I could have listened to him for hours.”

“Dale Henry was amazing and effective.”

“The Sixth Sense was the absolute best speaker at the entire Convention.”

Dr. Dale Henry grew up in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, an area that is bountiful in two things-hospitality and story-telling. Dr. Dale has been a teacher, principal, Dean of the oldest college in Tennessee, a businessman, author, a speaker and trainer. Dale has been in customer service over half his life. His story-telling ability propelled him as a teacher. This, combined with his customer service and unique ability to captivate audiences, has sky-rocketed Dale in his speaking career. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear his program Going For It On Fourth and One! on Monday, January 29th at 5:00 PM.

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Since the inception of AHCA/NCAL’s National Quality Award Program, more than 4,700 centers across the country have been recognized for their dedication and commitment to quality improvement.

The program, which is based on the Baldrige Performance Excellence Framework, is known for its focus on excellence and its rigorous and demanding set of criteria. The journey to quality improvement and performance excellence is challenging – but it can be done.

AHCA/NCAL has made available the story of Mountain Valley through a new six-part Webinar series for members on AHCA’s education platform, ahcancalED, to showcase the center’s successful journey to performance excellence.

In this series, Mountain Valley leaders share how their small, 68-bed rural center in Kellogg, Idaho achieved all three levels of the Quality Award Program, and then went on to receive the nation’s highest award for performance excellence, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Mountain Valley was the first and only long term care center ever to be recognized with this honor.

AHCA/NCAL members can access this series through ahcancalED here. Questions may be submitted to qualityaward@ahca.org.

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Alliant Quality wants to encourage SNFs to keep signing up for the National Collaborative – or SPACE. Alliant recommends having as much time as possible to get started on Quality Assurance Performance Improvement (QAPI) work and improving facility quality measures in a systems approach to improve their five star and composite scores.

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.

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 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.

To register, click here for the Participation Agreement and fax or e-mail it back to Lisa Klemis, contact information is on the Participation Agreement. For more details, e-mail Leighann Sauls at Leighann.Sauls@area-F.hcqis.org or call (919) 745-4730.

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Alliant Quality, the Quality Innovation Network-Quality Improvement Organization (QIN-QIO) for North Carolina is seeking central North Carolina skilled nursing facilities interested in collaborating on the Special Innovation Project (SIP) Improving Access to Palliative Care in the Long Term Care Facility.

Palliative care focuses on comfort and improving quality of life. A team of professionals helps residents and families navigate through the health care system and make health care decisions that are right for them. Goals of this project not only include providing quality of life and satisfaction for residents of skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), but also provision of services that minimize risks of potentially avoidable transfers to acute care.

Often, nursing home residents lack advance directives that would assist them at the end of life. When a resident, without an advanced directive, suffers a worsening of their clinical condition, a cascade of care is put into motion and can trigger unwanted emergency room visits and admissions, which can lead to other complications. The provision of palliative care services for SNF residents supports person-directed care in a proactive way to honor the patient and their choices.

Alliant Quality, in partnership with SNFs and palliative care organizations, will develop customized education and learning sessions for SNF leaders to better understand palliative care and its beneficial role for the residents whom they are caring for each day. This educational offering will be pilot-tested in central North Carolina with SNFs who are interested in this Special Innovation Project offered through the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services.

Participating SNFs will have the opportunity to:

• Receive free training programs designed to improve their SNF staff competency and knowledge related to end-of-life care
• Join a learning network with experts on palliative care in the SNF setting
• Partner with palliative care providers in order to improve the quality of life of their residents
• Implement low-burden measurement strategies that monitor resident and family satisfaction with end-of-life care
• Improve rates of avoidable acute care transfers and hospital admission and readmission rates

For more information, contact:
Jennifer Judson RN, BSN
Project Lead, Palliative Care
Office: (678) 527-3473
Jennifer.Judson@alliantquality.org

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For decades, horizontal hostility has been known to play a pivotal role in increasing nursing attrition rates. Team-Building Handbook: Improving Nurse-to-Nurse Relationships offers healthcare organizations a proactive approach to creating a healthy workplace for nursing staff. This small guide provides the core tools they need to build strong teams and avoid the unnecessary expense of finding, hiring, and training new nurses to replace burned-out staff.

This handbook can be used as part of healthcare orientation and precepting programs, as well as for in-services and self-study. Nurses will gain the skills they need to build cohesive teams and combat negativity if it arises in the workplace.

To order, visit http://www.AHCApublications.org or call (800) 321-0343. Fax orders may also be placed at (800) 869-5605.

Product #8375
AHCA MEMBERS $100.00

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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 Donna Snyder at donnas@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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How can leaders engage employees? Lessons from “Field of Dreams”

McKnight’s Article

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Pineapples take about 18-20 months to become ready to harvest.

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