by Jay Luxenberg, MD

It’s been a while since our last app article, and now it’s time to be nice, or rather NICE. You probably recognize this as the acronym for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the outfit the UK uses to analyze and promote best practices in medicine. They have a simply wonderful free app for both the iPhone and the Android OS, with detailed guidance on conditions and diseases, public health measures, and treatments, procedures and medical devices.

CALTCM President

Wow! What a conference! Thanks to the education committee and to all of  you who attended this year's CALTCM conference focused on person-centered care and palliative care. Based on early feedback and my own observations, it was a great conference with a focus absolutely on the right topic.

It is exciting that finally the larger health care system is beginning to recognize that something has gone terribly wrong with the US health care system. The entire reimbursement system has rewarded volume over quality. Everyone gets paid on the basis of numbers of procedures done and the proceduralists and specialists get paid much more than the primary care physicians. It is no surprise that this payment system drives incredible volumes of care delivered without quality outcome improvement.

On behalf of the judges of this year’s Posters, we say “Wow!” to those who shared their good work with our membership.  This was a fantastic display of efforts to identify and implement best practices at a facility level. (Attached below is a list of the posters that were displayed.)

Our 1st place award went to Joshua Chodosh, MD of UCLA for “Improving Depression Care in Nursing Facilities Using Practice Improvement Education (PIE) Through a Mentored Approach”.  This poster reported the outcome of this strategy used at 6 facilities who volunteered for this project after CALTCM’s workshop on depression 2 years ago.  It is based on reviewing the results of residents’ PHQ-9 depression screening test scores, which are performed with each MDS assessment.

by Drs. Steve Lai and Tim Gieseke

For this year’s annual conference, Mastering Patient-Centered Care Through Improved Communication, Care Transitions, and Palliative Care, the key themes will be better communication and palliative care.  In our fast-paced, technology-driven medical world, the principles of good palliative care need to be spread to our nursing home staffs and physicians caring for this frail patient population.  Despite the rapid growth and impact of hospital palliative care programs in the past decade, a major gap in access to palliative care exists.  It is imperative that we improve palliative care access in the skilled nursing facility as it is one key component in the chain of continuity for palliative care in the community.