Date: July 11, 2005
Contact: Barbara Schoof Conant
barbaraconant@aging.state.ks.us
Director of Communications
(785) 296-6154
Kansas has been selected by The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as one of five pilot states to test a new survey process for nursing facilities. The Kansas Department on Aging contracts with the federal agency to oversee nursing home compliance with federal and state regulations and will work with the CMS in testing the new process.
Kansas joins California, Connecticut, Louisiana and Ohio in the Quality Indicator Survey (QIS) study. Florida and Illinois were selected as alternates. Twenty states expressed interest in the project.
“Participation in this project is consistent with our goal to assure the quality and safety of nursing home care in Kansas through fair and equitable enforcement of compliance with state and federal regulations,” said KDOA Secretary Pamela Johnson-Betts. “We welcome this unique opportunity to be among the first in the nation to pilot the Quality Indicator Survey process.”
Seven years in development, the QIS process seeks to:
“The aim of the QIS process is to gain consistency in quality of care evaluations not only from region-to-region within the state but also from one state to another,” said Mark Boranyak, KDOA Commissioner of Licensure, Certification and Evaluation.
Kansas will commit two teams of surveyors, a manager and a technical resource person to the project. Teams will be trained by CMS in January 2006. After completing the training, the Kansas survey teams will use the new process in place of the current standard survey process in those nursing facilities chosen to be surveyed under the new QIS process.
The process, which relies on a computer-directed program, was developed by the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) with the University of Colorado’s Division of Health Care Policy and Research and the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Health Systems Research and Analysis.
Nationally, more than 6,000 federal and state surveyors conduct on-site reviews of every nursing home at least once every 15 months (about once a year, on average). On any given day, there are 1.6 million residents in 16,400 nursing homes in the United States. Kansas has 311 certified nursing homes and 49 long-term care units in hospitals with nearly 25,000 beds. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment oversees regulatory compliance of the hospital units.