Throughout the summer, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is collecting data from 4,200 nursing homes to help develop best practices for a new quality assurance initiative.

The Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement program, as created by the Affordable Care Act, is intended to collect data on nursing home efforts to prevent hospitalizations. Facilities will be notified that they have been selected for participation via their Quality Improvement Evaluation System mailbox.

They then will be able to choose how they would like to respond; they can complete an online questionnaire, or have a hard copy mailed to their facility.