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Volume 3 Issue 193 Published - 14:00 UTC 08:00 EST 16-Oct-2001 Next Update - 14:00 UTC 08:00 EST 17-Oct-2001
| Editor: Susan K. Boyer, RN © RAmEx Ars Medica, Inc. All rights reserved. |
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 Annals Of Internal Medicine Unveils Comprehensive Set Of Indicators To Assess The Quality Of Care Provided To At-Risk "Vulnerable" Elders
A first-ever comprehensive set of indicators to assess the quality of care provided to at-risk "vulnerable" elders appears in the 16 October 2001 supplement of Annals of Internal Medicine. These indicators are the product of the first phase of Assessing Care of Vulnerable Elders, the ACOVE Project, a six-year collaboration between Pfizer Inc and RAND. The goal of the first phase of ACOVE was to develop and test a system to evaluate the quality of healthcare received by community-dwelling older adults. The measurement system is based on the evidence contained in the medical literature and on the clinical expertise of independent panels of experts. An advisory panel of nationally renowned geriatrics experts identified the 22 clinical conditions most important for quality measurement among vulnerable older persons, for which effective treatments exist. The Annals of Internal Medicine supplement describes the full set of quality indicators for these 22 medical conditions. The supplement also includes the evidence supporting the quality indicators for half of the conditions: dementia, end-of-life-care, falls and mobility, heart failure, medication management, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, pain management, pressure ulcers, pneumonia, and urinary incontinence. Papers describing the evidence supporting the other eleven conditions are available on the American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine website (http://www.acponline.org/sci-policy/). "Existing measures of quality can be used to assess care for many segments of the American population, but these measures are often not applicable to ill older individuals. The ACOVE Project is helping to fill a critical gap by rigorously considering the care provided to vulnerable older adults," says RAND's Neil Wenger, MD, the ACOVE co-principal investigator. Wenger is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine. RAND's Paul Shekelle, MD, PhD, notes that "these measures should provide the information needed for health care providers to detect and remedy areas of care in need of improvement. The information might also be used by patients and their loved ones to select providers who focus on the kind of care they need." Shekelle is a Senior Associate of the Veterans Affairs Health Service Research and Development Service and an Associate Professor of Medicine at UCLA. "ACOVE represents an innovative step towards improving the care of this important segment of our population," says Joseph Feczko, M.D., senior vice president, Medical and Regulatory Operations at Pfizer. "This complements the focus of our extensive Research and Development programs - namely, to bring better medicines and care to patients as rapidly as possible." In developing the ACOVE criteria, RAND physicians, health services researchers, and policy analysts were aided by outcomes researchers and clinical experts at Pfizer. The ACOVE set of quality indicators was produced by independent panels of clinical experts. The project is guided by a Policy Advisory Committee that is chaired by Dr. Phillip Lee from the Institute for Health Policy Studies, University of California at San Francisco. This advisory committee includes Margaret O'Kane of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, Dennis O'Leary of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, John Rother of the American Association of Retired Persons, and Steven Clauser of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. |
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