If you have an EHR, you may think you have the data you need for complete QA reporting.  But when it comes to QA events, your EHR will likely leave you with questions — not answers — when an incident occurs.

Sure, you’ll have the incident recorded in the system, but your EHR simply isn’t designed to help you improve your quality outcomes. Here’s why your EHR can’t help you with QA reporting.

Skilled nursing and assisted living communities face unique challenges: they provide medical care while still needing to feel like home. This means that in addition to preventing incidents, you’re working hard to help your residents enjoy a high quality of life.

Providing a great resident experience doesn’t have to be complex. A few simple steps can help you put your best foot forward and be the community that others strive to emulate.

There’s a lot at stake for assisted living facilities.

At HealthCap, our philosophy has always been that the best claim is the claim you never have to file. So risk prevention has been a real emphasis of ours. We visit nearly every member on their premises every year to help them deliver better quality to their residents, families, and employees. The visits involve a mix of consultation, data gathering, and analytics. As a by-product, we help reduce claims.

Skilled nursing providers were given the short shrift when legislators wrote and enacted health information technology (HIT) meaningful use legislation. Acute care hospitals and docs were given federal dollars for tech innovation, but LTPAC providers were given nothing helpful (money, guidance). SNF providers were given mandates related to improving quality, but not the means to measure and improve it. Legislators and regulators demand more and more from skilled nursing providers related to quality outcomes, but they ignore that the data needed to drive better outcomes has to come from somewhere.

This coming fall, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will issue the long-awaited updated requirements that long term care facilities must meet to participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. At just over 112,000 words, the proposed rules and their implications to LTPAC providers are overwhelming.

Faxing of personal health information (PHI) is allowable by the HIPAA Privacy Rule. In this article, we give you a bit of background into the HIPAA Privacy Rule and give some best practices in faxing and emailing incident reports to QA Reader.

It seems whenever I ask long term and post-acute care providers whether they use paper forms, they respond apologetically: “Yes we use forms, but we know we shouldn’t.” Most providers think that there’s something inherently wrong with collecting information on paper. There isn’t. Paper is data, too.

Many QA Reader subscribers rely on our innovative data stream to identify, document, and report professional and general liability incidents to their Insurance carriers. Timely reporting of incidents to your insurance carrier is your obligation, and carriers can deny an incident or claim if it isn't reported in a timely basis.

Someone once told me that interoperability was like a unicorn: everyone has heard of it, but no one has actually seen it. Why is interoperability so hard to come by? One major reason is that most healthcare software companies fear it when they should embrace it.

Preventing Bedsores - American College of Physician publication ACP Publication March 26, 2015