Co-Chair: David Foster, Caregiver, Community Member

Co-Chair: Deb Holtz, Ombudsman for Long Term Care, MN Board on Aging

Team Members: Judy Berry; John Brose, PhD; Connie Brown; Jayne Clairmont; Mike Demmer; Carol Feldheim; Kathleen Harrington; Bob Held; John Hobday; Alvin Holm, MD; Jeanne Jacobson; Neil Johnson; Jessica Kirchoff; Jon Lips; Jen McNertney; Christine Mueller, PhD; Jane Pederson, MD; Tanya Rand; Karen Riddle; Stuart Schmitz; Carol Shapiro; Angie Swetland; David Tullar; Robin Weis

Staff: Marsha Berry; John Selstad

The Team will focus on the experience of individuals and their families from the time they first suspect a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease through the stages of the disease to end of life. Areas of special concern include availability, accessibility, and quality of education and support services for family caregivers in a home setting, and the quality of professional caregiving, both in the home and in residential facilities. As a framework for their recommendations, the Team will promote a model that encourages coordinated care across medical providers, caregivers, agencies, institutions, and non-profit organizations, centered on the needs of patients and families.

Specifically, the Team will develop findings and make recommendations regarding the following:

Developing optimal approaches for educating and supporting professional and family caregivers with regard to quality and mechanisms for caregivers to access new knowledge.
Ensure timely and coordinated offering of quality home and community-based services, including ideas for improving the quality of the entire continuum of support offered by the range of formal, quasi-formal and informal community programs.
Recommending curriculum regarding quality standards, measurement of performance, and ongoing quality improvement for all current health practitioners and all practitioners in training. Provide special focus on assisted living and nursing home staff competency, quality measures and strategies for optimal consumer and family direction in all settings.
Completing the Achieving Quality Expert Team evaluation matrix and coordinating with all other expert teams to achieve greatest possible completeness.

Specific Planned Activities

In general, the goal of the committee is to complete the Evaluation Matrix. This will involve activities such as the following. When these are completed, we should have a clear picture of where services and resources exist, whether and how they are measured, and where the gaps exist.

Examine information typically given to families at the time of diagnosis, the channels for that information to be delivered, and current educational practices for healthcare professionals around referrals. Goal: Develop a standard packet and a standard educational curriculum so all professionals know what to tell the affected family.
Look at how the typical family obtains information about available services, such as care management, support groups, in-home care, respite, financial support, and residential service. Goal: Break the isolation of the family by making the sources of help obvious and easily available.
Adapt this standard curriculum for other community professionals and propose innovative ways to reach them. These include lawyers, financial planners and bankers, pharmacists, social workers, law enforcement officers, clergy, etc. Goal: Make sure professionals know what information to deliver and how to deliver it.
Examine the documents that describe best practices, and recommend similar documents for areas that are not covered. For example, we have adopted Alzheimer’s Association Care Practice Recommendations for Nursing Homes, End of Life Care, and Professionals in a Home Setting. Should there be a guide to best practices for non-professional caregivers, such as family members? Goal: work toward having a description of best practices for each type of caregiver.
Where quality measurement approaches exist, examine them to ensure that they are working and that the information they produce is useful and up-to-date. Goal: make sure that current measures are effective and useful.
Where quality measurement does not exist, look for ways to measure. Example: how to measure the quality of in-home care? For the definition of quality, we will use the framework proposed by Hal Freshly of the MBA. Goal: over time, make sure that every type of service has an associated measurement methodology.
For each service and potential service, define a target population and look at the resources available to deliver the service to that population. For example, if a service exists and can be certified as a high-quality service, but it cannot scale to meet demand, this should be identified as a gap. Goal:

To view meeting materials and resources, go to the Navigator box on the right side of your screen, and select "Pages" or "Files" under the Achieving Quality Expert Team folder.