Five-Star Quality Rating System

On December 18, 2008, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented the Five-Star Program. This system has already created a lot of confusion in the industry. The basis for the program is information from:

• Annual Surveys -three most recent surveys and revisits
• Staffing - Acuity Adjusted
• Quality Measures - 10 of 19 utilized for comparison

Although national provider groups have expressed their concerns about the validity and the value of the information in assessing quality provided in facility, we need to understand what the public is seeing. You need to learn all the details of this new system. The following resources are available:

Technical User Guide: http://www.cms.hhs.gov/CertificationandCompliance/Downloads/usersguide.pdf

Nursing Home Compare Website:

www.medicare.gov/NHCompare

Watch for news of a Boyer & Associates training session coming soon on the Five-Star Nursing Home Rating System. In the mean time, please call Pat Boyer with any questions. Boyer & Associates, LLC has an acuity based staffing model available for facilities.

Boyer Development Center Open House

Our Open House in November was a great success. We had lots of visitors to our new training center and lots of food and refreshments. We kicked off our Development Center with our first workshop on Investigations with 16 participants. We have since had a successful first Web Ex session. Our 2009 1st quarter schedule is now posted and ready to go! We are so excited about our new educational offerings and look forward to working with facilities across the country. Let us know what you think, give us suggestions of workshops you'd like to see and join us in a session soon. Pat

AHCA 2008 Convention

Come see the Boyer and Associates, LLC Clinical Team at the 59th Annual AHCA/NCAL Convention & Exposition, Nashville, TN, USA on October 5-8, 2008.
Two of the Boyer Nurse Consultants are presenting two educational sessions:

Differentiating Ulcer Types on Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 10:30am-11:30am. The presentation will be provided by Evonne Fillinger, BS, RN, WCC, Clinical Operations and Pat Boyer, MSM, RN, NHA, President and Operations Consultant.

Standards of Clinical Practice: Nursing vs. Physician Perspective on Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 8:30am-10:30am. The speakers for this presentation include: Gail Robison RN, RAC-CT, Clinical Nurse Consultant along with Bonnie Wirfs MD, CMD, FACP, Geriatric Medicine Physician and Pat Boyer, MSM, RN, NHA, President and Operations Consultant.

We hope to see you all there. For further information about the conference you can look to this webpage: http://www.ahcaconvention.org/

WAHSA conference photo

Photo from the fall WAHSA conference

WAHSA Fall Conference Activities

Boyer and Associates, LLC was most committed to the 2008 WAHSA Fall Conference & 28th Annual Exhibitors Forum on September 24-26, 2008 at the Hotel Sierra & KI Convention Center, Green Bay, Wisconsin. The conference theme was Reach Wider: Grow Deeper.

On Thursday, September 25, 2008 Gail Robison RN, RAC-CT, Clinical Operations Consultant along with Bonnie Wirfs MD, CMD, FACP, Geriatric Medicine Physician provided a three part series on Clinical Standards of Practice.

The three part series included:

1. The ABC’s of Facility Behavior Related to Our Clinical Practice
2. Reach for Evidence-based Medicine, Clinical Practice and Care and
3. Make QA Improvements Based on Sound Clinical Practice.

The audience of clinicians and other experts primarily remained through all three separate presentations. This topic is one of critical interest with a tremendous increase in citations related to Quality of Care cross referenced to Standards of Clinical Practice. The foci included how the Medical director and Medical staff assist facility practice through geriatric approaches to care, implementation of evidence based medicine and geriatric principles. The focus of defining the role, responsibilities of the Medical staff and provision of geriatric medicine to improve care in nursing home facilities was of vast interest to the attendees. The nursing components and support of the process improvement through the understanding and utilization of facility/nursing process was extensively addressed to facilitate a successful facility Quality Assurance program based on sound clinical practice and the team working together to ensure the best practiced care for the residents of the facility.

The Boyer and Associates Team provided a booth as part of the Exhibitors Forum on September 25th. As a diamond conference sponsor the Boyer and Associates, LLC also provided the refreshment breaks for Thursday September 25th at 10:30am and 3:30 pm.

Additionally we sponsored the evening entertainment: WAHSA Idol Competition September 25th. The talent in the WAHSA group was unexpected and a difficult challenge for the judges to select the winners.

The 28th WAHSA Conference was most successful and we took pleasure in providing a team approach to support this conference.