Health-Care Quality

SUSTAINING ACHIEVABLE VITALITY AND EFFECTIVENESS.
This is a research project based in the Quality of Care and Healthcare Standards center (John N. Morris, Principal Investigator). Members of the research team evaluate the role of a quality-of-care improvement trail for mood symptoms among nursing home residents. 

DELIRIUM AND QUALITY OF CARE IN POST-ACUTE CARE SETTINGS. 
As an ancillary study to Dr. Marcantonio's delirium trail, we discovered that post-acute care facilities that admit more patients with delirium  also have more deficiencies on nursing home inspections. This research project is probing this observation. It may be that higher quality nursing homes can be more selective in their admissions. If true, poor quality facilities may enter a cycle of having to admit the most frail patients, resulting in inequity in distribution of high quality nursing home care and self-perpetuating cycle of poor quality of care in long-term care settings.

EVALUATION OF THE EXTENDED CAREER LADDER INITIATIVE (ECCLI). 
The ECCLI program is a career ladder program supported by the Commonwealth Corporation, a quasi-public agency of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. IFAR investigators have completed an evaluation of ECCLI on quality of care outcomes for nursing home residents. We have found that facilities that participated in ECCLI have better outcomes than matched facilities that did not participate, particularly on social and behavioral domains.