Reports

This document was created by the CMS Quality Council, in an effort to delineate and advance a vision for improving of medical care. It provides a summary of CMS's many quality-related initiatives. The goal of the quality roadmap is to ensure the right care for every person every time and to do this by making care safe, effective, efficient, patient-centered, timely and equitable.

From the spring of 2004 through January 2005, a series of surveys was administered to long term care workers (DCWs) and their employers in the tri-county area of Clinton, Eaton and Ingham counties of Michigan. The survey was designed to establish a baseline profile of the area workforce and identify potential areas for advocacy on behalf of the workforce, especially in the areas of recruitment, training and retention. This report contains survey questions and results.

Rutgers/NASHP Community Living Exchange sponsored a one-day meeting of the Vermont and Maine direct support worker associations. The purpose of the event was to provide a leadership development opportunity for the staff and volunteer members of the two association's board of directors. Sixteen people attended the meeting including nine direct support workers.

The main aims of this paper are to categorize and analyze different types of arrangements allowing home-care users choice and map the prevalence, to review outcomes in terms of flexibility, care quality, satisfaction and conditions for care givers, and to analyze the implications for employment and fiscal sustainability. This paper covers services in 12 OECD countries (Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom and United States).

This report presents information aggregated from 13 F2F HICs and provides an early indication of the extent and importance of the activities of these critical family centers. The data indicates that F2F HICs are steadily increasing their capacity to document what they do. Both families and professionals frequently seek expertise and assistance from F2F HICs. The most common concerns reported relate to needs for adequate health care financing and links to community resources.

This report provides an overview of the NFT initiatives implemented by 18 of the FY ‘01 and FY ‘02 Systems Change Grantees. It describes their differing approaches to nursing facility diversion and/or transition within a framework of the key steps needed to create programs that are integrated into a state’s LTC system. This report also identifies the transition challenges and policy issues states and ILCs are facing, and discusses the implications for moving forward with rebalancing efforts.

Medicaid is the major public payer of community services and supports for working age adults with serious mental illnesses. This handbook explains how existing Medicaid options and waivers are used by states to finance a broad range of community services and supports for adults with serious mental illnesses, and demonstrates what aspects of state-of-the art community services and supports for this population are funded by Medicaid.

The 2004 Consumer Direction Initiative Summit convened 79 recipients of mental health, addiction services, families, policymakers, and providers to develop recommendations for SAMHSA’s next steps towards fostering consumer-directed approaches in behavioral health care services for people with substance use disorders, mental illnesses and children with serious emotional disturbances. The report from the summit reviews issues raised in working papers and at the meeting.

In 2001, CMS worked with state agency associations to initiate the National Quality Inventory Project (NQIP) with a goal to obtain baseline information about state HCBS waiver program QA/I systems. Through this project an extensive survey of state QA/I systems was conducted. This report describes NQIP, summarizes and discusses the results of this first-time, nationwide systematic survey of state waiver program QA/I systems. The report also includes recommendations for CMS follow-up.

The purpose of this 2001 Real Choice System Change grant project is to review personal assistance services policies across departments and programs to identify unnecessary inconsistencies and opportunities to maximize consumer choice and control. This comparative analysis identifies opportunities for increasing consumer choice and control across Maine’s personal assistance services (PAS) program and offers additional findings and recommendations.