As part of your membership benefit, LeadingAge offers members a powerful quality improvement data tool, Quality Metrics. Users of the program, can customize groups composed of any nursing facility in the country and benchmark against them. This tool is particularly useful to monitor QAPI progress and for board reports.

Long stay and short stay quality metrics can be evaluated directly amoung groups or by comparing your organization to a peer group. Additionally, members can easily compare staffing levels, 5-star ratings, and deficiency patterns.

The time series analysis is helpful when evaluating a drop in performance on a quality measure to identify when the change occurred or to monitor progress or sustainment of a quality improvement goal. For example, in the time series analysis below, Iowa non-profits (black line) have high risk pressure ulcer rates for long stay far below the national averge (blue line), Iowa for-profits (red line), and the Iowa state average (green line).

At the same time, Iowa non-profits’ rate of falls with major injury (black line) have exceeded the rate of Iowa for-profits (red line), the Iowa statewide average (green line), and the national average (blue line) in 7 of the last 17 quarters since 2016Q3.

How does your organization compare on these and other quality metrics? If you have had a sharp turn in the wrong direction, can the time series analysis help your organization pin-point internal changes that may lend to the change? One LeadingAge member experienced a sharp incline in their weight-loss quality metric, and the time series analysis helped them identify that the increased weight loss started when the organization switched food vendors which they had not connected with the problem until looking at it over time. Not every issue is that easy to solve, but all members are encouraged to use the tools available to them to assist.

Click here to get started with Quality Metrics or to revisit if it has been a while. Your log-in information is the same as your LeadingAge national log-in which can be created or found here. For general questions, please contact Christy Kramer at ckramer@leadingage.org. For technical questions, please contact Beth Webb at LANY.