Upcoming Changes to Quality Improvement Initiatives
To our quality improvement partners:
For the last five years, Mountain Pacific has served as one of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) contractors, supporting nursing home and community quality improvement with nearly 15,000 nursing homes and communities in 34,000 zip codes. We join CMS in greatly appreciating our collaborative partnership in improving health care quality. Some key highlights from our work nationally include:
Quality Innovative Network-Quality Improvement Organizations (QIN-QIOs) worked with more than 11,600 nursing homes.
Rapid response COVID-19 reduction efforts led to 6,700 nursing home residents’ lives saved in the first year of the pandemic and continues to reduce COVID-19 infections among nursing home residents. Nursing homes who worked with QIN-QIOs had:
2% fewer resident COVID-19 infections
4% fewer resident hospitalizations
3% fewer resident deaths
The QIN-QIOs had more than 40,000 one-on-one encounters as part of a targeted COVID-19 vaccine response.
Nursing home resident deaths from COVID-19 fell by 55%.
Working with community partners, the emphasis on preventive health led to a 12.5% reduction in hospitalizations and 20% reduction in all-cause readmissions.
CMS released a new, five-year, quality improvement contract for the work we have been doing together. Many of the quality improvement initiatives with this new work will be related to activities you already know, plus a focus on some new ones. Working with acute care hospitals, rural and critical access hospitals, nursing homes and outpatient clinical practices, the goal of the new contract is to meet providers and practitioners where they are with their quality improvement activities, with a focus on the following initiatives:
Preventing and better managing chronic disease, including diabetes, hypertension and chronic kidney disease with access to community resources and education.
Continuing to improve hospitals and nursing home stays with reduced health care acquired infections, adverse drugs events and falls.
Improving support and screening for depressive symptoms and substance use disorders and better managing chronic pain.
Improving care coordination across setting with reducing readmission and avoidable emergency room visits.
Developing patient and family advisory councils to improve engagement of beneficiaries and families as active partners in care and quality.
Supporting providers and practitioners’ quality management structure, being attentive to emergency preparedness, cybersecurity, climate change, workforce planning and supply chains and shortages.
We will be working with CMS and other organizations and partners to transition into these updated initiatives, which officially launch in early 2025.
Please take a moment to read this important letter from CMS. We will be in touch with information over the next couple of months as we learn more from CMS.
In the meantime, we wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for your years of partnership and for all the work you have done to support your colleagues, your patients and your community. We know you do all you can to support quality health care services, and that you will continue to do so – even amid this everchanging industry. Thank you.
Questions? Contact us.
Fort Peck QAPI Learning Session 6
Fort Peck QAPI Learning Session 6
Posted April 2021
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Fort Peck QAPI Learning Session 5
Fort Peck QAPI Learning Session 5
Posted April 2021
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Mountain Pacific
Mountain Pacific is a nonprofit health care improvement organization that partners within our communities to provide solutions for better health. We first opened our doors in Helena, Montana, in 1973; since then, we have broadened our reach to include Wyoming, Alaska, Hawaii and the U.S. Pacific Territories of Guam, American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
Quality Innovation Network-Quality Improvement Organization (QIN-QIO)
Part of what we do is under the direction of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). We partner with health care providers, practitioners, stakeholders, patients and families on a variety of quality improvement initiatives to achieve better care, better population health and lower health care costs. These initiatives include:
- Preventing healthcare-associated infections in hospitals and nursing homes
- Preventing healthcare-acquired conditions related to long-term care in nursing homes
- Improving the coordination of care from one health care setting to another and reducing unnecessary hospital admissions and readmissions
- Improving cardiovascular health
- Improving the health and wellbeing of people with diabetes
Montana Medicaid
Mountain Pacific provides Medicaid utilization review and management services for the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services. We have been performing medical case review for specific Medicaid contracts since 1974. Through our review process, we strive to enable each Medicaid client to get his or her needs met in the most appropriate, cost-effective setting, using the most appropriate medical service, equipment and supplies.
Health Transformation Consulting Services
Mountain Pacific offers technical assistance, guidance and information on best practices to support and accelerate health care providers’ efforts to become meaningful users of electronic health records (EHRs).
