Providers should focus on quality indicators to cope with payment changes, executive advises

Changing payment models and an impending budget debate in Congress will force nursing homes to do more with fewer resources, a top long-term care executive told McKnight's.

In an interview with McKnight's Senior Editor Elizabeth Newman, Neil Pruitt, chairman of the American Health Care Association, said adapting to payment changes has been very hard for the long-term care group's members. However, the association's new quality initiative and its emphasis on collecting quality data can give providers some help.

Pruitt, who also is chairman and CEO of UHS-Pruitt, said AHCA's quality initiative boiled down a number of quality indicators to the four most important.

“We are encouraging our members to take the indicators and lay them out for their staff,” Pruitt told Newman. “Enroll in our LTC trend tracker product because it's a free service we have for our members that tracks all their benchmarking data and really allows them to drill down into the root cause of their problem.”

Click on the video posted above to see the interview with Pruitt at the AHCA annual conference in Tampa. Click here for previous conference coverage.