Quality Improvement in Home Health
Since 2003, Oklahoma Foundation for Medical Quality has partnered with volunteer home health agencies throughout the state as part of the federally directed Home Health Quality Improvement Initiatives (HHQI). Led by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), HHQI aims to:
- empower consumers with quality of care information to make more informed decisions about their health care, and
- stimulate and support providers and clinicians to improve the quality of health care.
Home health agencies participating in Home Health Quality Improvement Initiatives (HHQI) measure and report performance on quality measures that indicate how well their patients perform activities of daily living such as bathing and taking their medicines. They also include data about physical status and use of hospitalization and emergency care. CMS makes performance data available to the public via the www.medicare.gov (compare) websites. This public reporting helps consumers make more informed decisions and provides additional incentive for agencies to improve the care they provide. As the Quality Improvement Organization for Oklahoma, OFMQ’s assists home health agencies successfully implement quality improvement principles and techniques to achieve better performance and ultimately better patient outcomes.
Our Progress
OFMQ has provided training and ongoing support to virtually all of Oklahoma's Medicare-certified home health agencies to ensure the successful implementation of quality improvement practices. From 2003-2005, 61 home health agencies across the state achieved statistically significant improvement in areas including breathing difficulty, acute care hospitalization, urinary incontinence, pain and use of emergency room care. In fact, of the 11 publicly reported quality measures, Oklahoma improved better than the national average in eight of them, including improvement in urinary incontinence, improvement in pain interfering with activity and improvement in ambulation.
Program Focus:
We are currently focused on improvement strategies to:
Essential Partnerships
The HHQI is a collaborative effort between federal and state agencies, quality improvement organizations, independent health quality organizations, consumer advocates and home health providers.
OFMQ maintains key partnerships with the State Department of Health, the Oklahoma Association for Home Care, the Department of Human Services, Area Agencies on Aging and a majority of home health providers in the state, building collaborative relationships among all parties interested in improving home health care quality in Oklahoma.
By creating partnerships that expand our knowledge and resources, we will achieve greater and more immediate improvements in the quality of home health care.