Introducing Avalere’s New Malnutrition Quality Improvement Initiative to Address Gaps and Barriers to Quality Care in Hospitals

Summary

Despite evidence demonstrating the benefits of optimal nutrition for healing and recovery, practice variation continues in hospitals for nutrition screening, assessment, diagnosis, and overall treatment and management of malnourished adults ages 65 and older. In response, Avalere launched the Malnutrition Quality Improvement Initiative (MQII) to support the delivery of high-quality care for older adults. The MQII not only aims to support the use of timely best practices for malnutrition care in the hospital setting but may also reduce costs associated with poor patient outcomes.

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The initiative is founded upon research and multi-stakeholder engagement that identified opportunities to facilitate optimal malnutrition care. It is comprised of two components-the MQII Demonstration and Learning Collaborative and the MQII Electronic Clinical Quality Measure (eCQM) Development.

The goals of the MQII Demonstration and Learning Collaborative are to

Reduce clinical practice variability in malnutrition care
Provide a feasible and usable toolkit for malnutrition quality improvement
Improve knowledge of the importance of malnutrition and best practices malnutrition care
Explore clinical outcomes of average length of stay and 30-day all-cause readmissions as surrogates for the cost of care

The goal of the MQII eCQM Development is to establish malnutrition-focused eCQMs to assess whether and by how much hospital care teams are successful in meeting the standards of care.

These components work together to help improve malnutrition care with better tools for care providers, malnutrition quality measures, and advanced resources that can be integrated into electronic health records systems.

MQII findings as well as eCQMs following testing will be published shortly. Look out for the release of the MQII toolkit and assess opportunities for facilities’ use. To participate in MQII as a Learning Collaborative site or as an eCQM testing site, please contact Kelsey Jones at MalnutritionQuality@avalere.com.

The MQII is facilitated in partnership with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics with support provided by Abbott.