AAHSA TOOL Helps Consumers Identify Quality Providers

       A new tool from the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging (AAHSA) can help older adults and their loved ones ask the long-term care organizations they are considering a series of questions that will help them find high-quality care and services to meet their needs.
       The guide, “Consumers’ Guide to Quality Aging Services,” features a series of questions designed to help consumers learn how different providers are managed, which values drive their work, and, most important, how they meet and individual’s needs and preferences.
       The questions encompass the “10 Elements of AAHSA Quality First,” an initiative designed to help aging-services providers achieve excellence and earn public trust in their work. More than 3,300 of AAHSA’s not-for-profit members have signed the AAHSA Quality First Covenant to demonstrate their commitment to quality of care and services for the people they serve. Among the questions in the guide are:
• How do you include family members in making decisions about the care and services for their loved ones?
• Does your organization have a written code of ethics?
• What training opportunities do you offer employees?
       For more information or to download the guide, visit the “Consumer Information” section of www.aahsa.org.

Leavitt Outlines Steps Toward ‘Personalized’ Healthcare

       Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Mike Leavitt recently outlined a course for achieving gene-based medical care combined with health information technology, which he called “personalized” healthcare. He said the initiative has the potential to transform the quality, safety, and value of healthcare for patients in the future.
       “Personalized healthcare will combine the basic scientific breakthroughs of the human genome with computer-age ability to exchange and manage data,” he says. “Increasingly, it will give us the ability to deliver the right treatment to the right patient at the right time—every time.
       In a speech before the annual meetings of the Personalized Medicine Coalition, Leavitt outlined steps already under way to develop the needed information as well as new steps he is undertaking to build the foundation for personalized healthcare and
       Gene-based medicine can help individuals identify their particular susceptibilities to disease while they are well and take effective preventive steps. In the future, it will help detect the onset of disease much earlier, enabling treatment to prevent disease progression, and it can help bring about medical products that are tailored more precisely to the needs of each individual.
       Health information technology, including powerful new tools for managing vast amounts of information, will be needed both to continue building basic scientific knowledge and make the new knowledge useable and accessible for patient care.
       For more information, visit www.hhs.gov/myhealthcare.

CMS Announces Another Regional Collaborative

       The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announces an Arizona collaborative as the newest participant in its effort to produce more accurate, comprehensive measures of the quality of services at the provider level.
       Through the Better Quality Information to Improve Care for Medicare Beneficiaries (BQI) project, Arizona State University’s Center for Health Information and Research (CHIR) will combine its claims data or clinical information with that of Medicare to provide consistent measures of the quality of provider services.
       “The measurement results from these collaboratives will ultimately provide information to Medicare beneficiaries about the quality of care physicians treating Medicare beneficiaries provide,” says CMS’s Acting Administrator, Leslie V. Norwalk. “It will also provide valuable performance information to physicians who treat Medicare beneficiaries, making it a win-win effort for both providers and people with Medicare.”
       Currently, the BQI project is being implemented in four regional collaboratives around the country. The CHIR joins other collaboratives announced earlier by CMS, which include the California Cooperative Health Care Reporting Initiative, Indiana Health Information Exchange, Massachusetts Health Quality Partners, Minnesota Community Measurement, and Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality.
       For more information, visit www.hhs.gov/transparency.