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Learning
Collaborative
March 29, 2018
The
Dish
The
Dish provides a monthly update to
participating sites enrolling in the MQii Learning
Collaborative.
Spotlight:
National Dialgoue
Advancing
Patient-Centered Malnutrition Care
Transitions
On March 14th, Avalere,
the Academy
of Nutrition and Dietetics, and the Defeat
Malnutrition Today coalition hosted a multi-stakeholder
national dialogue event: “Advancing
Patient-Centered Malnutrition Care
Transitions” in Washington, D.C.
To date, malnutrition standards of care, tools, and best
practices have not been systematically adopted across
the care continuum, into care coordination models (e.g.,
the patient-centered medical home, accountable care), or
into population health management solutions (e.g.,
comprehensive shared care plans, the transitional care
model, or risk stratification models). The dialogue
sought to evaluate current gaps in care transitions for
malnourished patients and patients at-risk for
malnutrition.
Stakeholders with clinical,
advocacy, and academic expertise spent the day exploring
opportunities to address these gaps by advancing
adoption of standards of care, tools, and best practices
to improve quality malnutrition care transitions and
outcomes for these patients. Some of the key takeaways
from the day included:
- Malnutrition refers to both under- and
overnutrition and can present in individuals who
do not fit the traditional appearance of
“malnutrition” (e.g., overweight or obese
individuals).
- The term “malnutrition” is not understood and
seems to place the blame on patients and their
caregivers. There is a need to reframe this
concept as “insufficient nutrition” to
meaningfully discuss ways to address patients’
malnutrition to improve their health outcomes
and healing.
- Primary care clinicians in the community and
post-acute care setting largely lack training on
how to manage poor nutrition. Registered
dietitians can provide education to other
clinicians on how to appropriately identify
patients for malnutrition risk, when to refer
patients to an RD, and how to better find,
access, and use RDs within community and
post-acute care settings.
- There is a large opportunity to engage and
make use of underutilized clinical and
community-service providers, such as retail
pharmacists, social workers, meal delivery
service personnel, behavioral health counselors,
and patient caregivers, to support better
malnutrition care beyond the hospital
setting.
- Better aligning incentives (e.g., policy,
financial) with malnutrition care delivery would
greatly enhance the ability to identify and
treat malnutrition across care settings.
- Significant opportunities exist to improve how
nutrition data is systematically captured and
shared within and across care settings.
- More data needs to be generated and published
reflecting the impact of malnutrition on patient
outcomes as they transition across settings of
care to spur increased visibility to this issue
and better incentives for addressing it.
MQii
Learning Collaborative News
National
Quality Forum Annual
Conference
At the National Quality Forum Annual Conference in
Washington D.C. on March 12-13, Sharon M.
McCauley, MS, MBA, RDN, LDN, FADA, FAND, Senior
Director of Quality Management at the Academy of
Nutrition and Dietetics, shared key initial
findings from the Malnutrition Quality Improvement
Initiative (MQii). Sharon presented an abstract on
how the MQii supports delivery of evidence-based care
and drives improved outcomes. She discussed how the MQii
Learning Collaborative generated evidence on
hospital-based malnutrition care best practices by using
a dual-pronged approach of de novo electronic
clinical quality measures and a novel online
toolkit to support
inpatient quality improvement efforts. The results
provide some of the first real-world evidence of a
demonstrated, quantifiable gap in care which previous
research has linked to poorer clinical outcomes for
patients and higher costs for healthcare systems.
Onboarding
Checklist is Now Available
Are you ready to get your 2018 QI project underway?
Onboarding checklists are now available for sites
who have completed the Participant or Letter
agreement. The onboarding checklist provides
participants with an overview of the recommended
steps for getting approval to participate, tips to
setting up a project team, and a plan for designing
a QI project. Please reach out to your
MQii Team Point of Contact for this resource.
What’s
Around the Corner?
Upcoming
Events
Intalere Elevate 2018 Conference | May
20-23, 2018
Kelly Danis, RD, LDN
from the University of
Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) – Presbyterian
Shadyside will be a featured speaker
at the Intalere Elevate
Conference in May. She will be presenting
on the MQii and UPMC’s experience as a member of the
Learning Collaborative. UPMC’s MQii project will be
highlighted as a “best practice,” starting with
assessing facility readiness, navigating the approval
process, identifying a relevant malnutrition quality
improvement project, and finally, demonstrating project
outcomes. Kelly is the Director of Clinical Nutrition
for the Presbyterian Shadyside campuses as well as the
System Computrition Team for UPMC. She is also active at
the national level as a board member for the Clinical
Nutrition Managers Practice Group, a subgroup of The
Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and a member of The
Academy’s Quality Leader Alliance.
Additional details on the work Kelly and her team have
undertaken are available in this video.
Next
Steps
- If you have received
the 2018 participant or letter agreement,
please be sure to sign and return the
agreement as soon as possible.
- If you have not yet
received the 2018 participant or letter agreement,
please reach out to your MQii Team Point of Contact
for access to this resource.
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