Welcome to the FLEX Grant 2007 - 2008.........Welcome to the Flex Grant 2007 - 2008

Needs Assessment & Action Tools

• Critical Access Hosptial Selected Measures for Improvement Workplan
• Critical Access Hospital Fact Sheet
  • The March 2007 version of the Critical Access Hospital Fact Sheet, which provides general information about Critical Access Hospitals. Print versions of the fact sheet will be available around the week of May 7th.

2007 Grant Responsibilities Document

Flex Grant 2006/2007 Requirements - Just Updated 05/03/07

In collaboration with the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility Grant administered by Georgia State Office of Rural Health, a division of the Department of Community Health

GHA is pleased to announce that we have received the FLEX grant for the grant funding period of 9/1/06 through 6/30/07 from the State Office of Rural Health to pursue quality improvement activities and to provide technical support and assistance to Georgia’s 35 CAHs.

We look forward to continuing to partner with you in the Improving Quality of Care FLEX Program grant. Working together we can more quickly improve the quality of health care within the state of Georgia.

These funds will help GHA to:

• Provide a quality improvement program that concentrates on patient safety and quality of care outcomes and engage hospital trustees in quality improvement efforts.
  - Each hospital is required to participate in at least 1 collaborative to improve performance on CMS clinical areas (CHF, AMI, CAP, SCIP).
• Provide access to the CARE suite of data products and the use of quality indicators, data for internal monitoring, benchmarking for peer review, quality and safety improvements, culture of safety and reports to hospital Trustees.
  • Hospitals will be required to submit evidence of Quality reports to their board.
• Provide for peer review consultation by experienced medical advisor(s) and a quality and safety specialist to provide data driven technical assistance to the CAHs.
  • Hospitals will be required to follow the guidelines included in the CAH CEO Roundtable approved peer review manual.
• Support Georgia’s CAHs to collect and report performance data for patient quality and safety improvement activities and increased data submission to Hospital Compare and PHA.
  • Hospitals will be required to submit a letter to the SORH (State Office of Rural Health) explaining their decision to not submit data to CMS through QNet Exchange.

As a member of the CAH Quality and Safety Improvement Network, you will have the opportunity to participate in many different quality and educational activities. Hope you will attend the February 27th meeting on Lean Principles. The notice was sent yesterday.

We look forward to our continued work together on this quality improvement project. Please let us know of specific issues that you may want addressed that are not currently include. We want to make sure that we address your specific needs.

GHAREF and the Center for Rural Health were awarded money from the FLEX program to assist CAHs with quality improvement and physician peer review. The Center builds upon previous Flex grant-funded quality improvement programs by providing direct technical assistance and consultation in the use of performance data for certain required Medicare and state functions. These requirements are related to peer review, credentialing, privileging, quality management and safety improvement activities.

Georgia CAHs say that they had fewer opportunities from their support hospitals for working together to improve quality. The Center will work with CAHs to identify common needs, promote collaboration, and facilitate shared learning for better use of scarce resources. The use of web-based technology will give CAHs access to quality and safety data to identify opportunities to improve safety and outcomes. The Med Eval module will also provide physician-level data useful to the peer review and credentialing process.

Because of few physicians on staff, CAHs have a difficult time conducting peer-review. The data from Med Eval provides an objective screening device for determining potential peer-review, credentialing or privileging issues. Working with the Center medical advisor, local CAH peer review committees will review data and identify issues. Med Eval also identifies "best practice" physicians for shared learning of strategies leading to good outcomes and ways to increase the adoption of evidence-based practices and clinical guidelines.

Peer Review, Credentialing, and Privileging

More details to come

Upcoming Events - None at this time

Links to Other Presentations:

Overview of the 2006 National Patient Safety Goals Hospitals & Critical Access Hospitals (from 03/01/06)

• Adobe PDF Version
• Powerpoint Version