Abstract
BackgroundFrail older people admitted to acute care hospitals are at risk of a range of adverse outcomes, including geriatric syndromes, although targeted care strategies can improve health outcomes for these patients. It is therefore important to assess inter-hospital variation in performance in order to plan and resource improvement programs.Clinical quality outcome indicators provide a mechanism for identifying variation in performance over time and between hospitals, however to date there has been no routine use of such indicators in acute care settings.A barrier to using quality indicators is lack of access to routinely collected clinical data. The interRAI Acute Care (AC) assessment system supports comprehensive geriatric assessment of older people within routine daily practice in hospital and includes process and outcome data pertaining to geriatric syndromes.This paper reports the study protocol for the development of aged care quality indicators for acute care hospitals.Methods/DesignThe study will be conducted in three phases:1. Development of a preliminary inclusive set of quality indicators set based on a literature review and expert panel consultation,2. A prospective field study including recruitment of 480 patients aged 70 years or older across 9 Australian hospitals. Each patient will be assessed on admission and discharge using the interRAI AC, and will undergo daily monitoring to observe outcomes. Medical records will be independently audited, and3. Analysis and compilation of a definitive quality indicator set, including two anonymous voting rounds for quality indicator inclusion by the expert panel.DiscussionThe approach to quality indicators proposed in this protocol has four distinct advantages over previous efforts: the quality indicators focus on outcomes; they can be collected as part of a routinely applied clinical information and decision support system; the clinical data will be robust and will contribute to better understanding variations in hospital care of older patients; The quality indicators will have international relevance as they will be built on the interRAI assessment instrument, an internationally recognised clinical system.
Highlights
Frail older people admitted to acute care hospitals are at risk of a range of adverse outcomes, including geriatric syndromes, targeted care strategies can improve health outcomes for these patients
The approach to quality indicators proposed in this protocol has four distinct advantages over previous efforts: the quality indicators focus on outcomes; they can be collected as part of a routinely applied clinical information and decision support system; the clinical data will be robust and will contribute to better understanding variations in hospital care of older patients; The quality indicators will have international relevance as they will be built on the interRAI assessment instrument, an internationally recognised clinical system
This paper reports the protocol for the development of outcome oriented quality indicators (QI) that was successfully presented to the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council and received funding in 2009
Summary
Frail older people admitted to acute care hospitals are at risk of a range of adverse outcomes, including geriatric syndromes, targeted care strategies can improve health outcomes for these patients. Clinical quality outcome indicators provide a mechanism for identifying variation in performance over time and between hospitals, to date there has been no routine use of such indicators in acute care settings. Frail older people in acute care hospitals are at risk of a range of adverse outcomes There is evidence that some strategies directed at prevention or treatment of individual geriatric syndromes (e.g. delirium, functional decline) may be effective [10,11,12] In this context, one aspect of assessing a hospital’s performance might be to ask how well these problems (or potential problems) are identified, prevented and managed. It is likely that hospitals and treating units vary in their performance in implementing strategies to impact positively on these outcomes
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