Award Date: 2018

Project Lead(s): Dr. Andrea Moser and Andrew Costa

Project Title: Development of a Novel Physician Quality Scoring Tool for the Post-Acute and Long-Term Care of Persons with Neurocognitive Disorders

What is the issue?

Nursing homes are accommodating an increasing number of residents with diverse and complex medical issues. Primary care providers play an essential role in managing the needs of frail, vulnerable seniors. However, there is no consistent way to measure the quality of care provided to nursing home patients and ensure care team members follow best practices for quality care.

What did we do?

We created a new tool, called the Primary Care Provider Quality Score (PQS), to measure the quality of care provided to people with dementia living in nursing homes. . To help identify the measures in this tool, we convened a technical expert panel to generate a shortlist of 37 quality measures that were considered to be the most feasible and valid. We validated these quality measures with a review of 343 patient charts from seven nursing home organizations across Canada and the United States. The technical expert panel then selected twelve measures for the final version of the PQS tool. We created a PQS toolkit containing an online tool and audit manual.

What did we find?

The Seniors Quality Leap Initiative (SQLI) and other organizations can now use PQS to measure the quality of care provided to people with dementia. Our work showed that it is possible to rigorously and efficiently measure and track the quality of care received by nursing home residents who have neurocognitive disorders.