Taiwan Healthcare Leaders Visit Seattle to Study United States Best Practices
October 19, 2009
Seattle, WA - Taiwanese healthcare officials visited Seattle-based Qualis Health on Monday, October 19 to study how the United States conducts acute and sub-acute care nursing practices for patients. Qualis Health, a healthcare consulting and care management firm, hosted 19 Taiwanese Long Term Care leaders taking part in the “US Sub-acute Care Learning Tour.”
Taiwanese healthcare officials were greeted by Qualis Health President and CEO, Jonathan Sugarman, MD, MPH, who stated, “We are honored to have been selected to share our country’s best practices with our fellow healthcare professionals from Taiwan. Regulation and accreditation standards derived from our national and state level systems design have served as the foundation of our quality improvement initiatives, and we look forward to sharing those findings with our Taiwanese visitors.”
Li-Chan Lin, RN, PhD, Professor at the School of Nursing, Yang-Ming University, said that the group’s aim was to understand criteria of admission to the US sub-acute system, especially nursing home facilities. Sub-acute care is goal-oriented treatment provided immediately after or instead of hospitalization to treat complex medical conditions. Topics discussed included sub-acute care/post-acute care, the basic requirement for establishing those care criteria and the manpower required for US Medicare sub-acute care reimbursement.
Qualis Health is a leader in identifying and promoting nursing homes best practices. Under its contract as the Medicare Quality Improvement Organization for Washington and Idaho, Qualis Health provides in-depth assistance to nursing homes, particularly focusing on improving key quality measures related to preventing bedsores and lowering the use of physical restraints. Qualis Health is nationally recognized for its leadership of the landmark National Nursing Home Improvement Collaborative, in which 52 participating nursing homes in 39 states successfully reduced the incidence of the most serious bed sores by 69 percent in one year.
The United States tour for the Taiwanese Long Term Care leaders will also include stops at three nursing homes and one health plan. This is the second visit to Qualis Health by the Taiwan healthcare officials. Taiwan hospitals, nursing homes, insurance plans and universities were all represented on the tour.
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About Qualis Health
Qualis Health, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, is an independent nonprofit organization established in 1974. We provide leadership, expertise and innovation in improving the health of individuals and populations across the healthcare continuum through our core services in utilization management, care coordination, clinical quality improvement and health information technology and operations improvement consulting.
Under a contract with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Qualis Health also serves as the Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) for the states of Idaho and Washington. The QIO program ensures the quality, effectiveness, efficiency and economy of healthcare services to people with Medicare.
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