Moving Forward Coalition Releases Action Plans

The Moving Forward Coalition, a multi-stakeholder initiative focused on making changes in policy and practices to improve nursing home quality, released nine action plans last week. Founded by LeadingAge National, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the John A. Hartford Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, the Coalition seeks to promote and test strategies to advance the goals identified by the 2022 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Report.

Each action plan addresses a specific challenge facing nursing homes that is important to resident care and quality of life. They also describe focused goals and provide action steps to achieving those goals. The action plans are:

1. Addressing Residents’ Goals, Preferences, and Priorities: Develop and/or adapt a data-supported, tech-enabled process for collecting goals, preferences, and priorities (GPPs); documenting them in a care plan; and measuring the degree to which the care provided meets them.
2. Strengthening Resident Councils: Assemble and test a guide for nursing home teams to establish and sustain an engaging and inclusive resident council.
3. Improving Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) Wages and Support: Work with individual states and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to expand and fully finance the inclusion of workforce compensation metrics in state quality incentive payment programs.
4. Expanding CNA Career Pathways: Work with workforce training and development leaders to design and pilot a standardized CNA career pathway reflecting the federal Registered Apprenticeship program framework.
5. Enhancing Surveyor Training on Person-Centered Care: To conduct a state demonstration project to pilot test and evaluate an enhanced surveyor training approach to resident-directed living.
6. Designing a Targeted Nursing Home Recertification Survey: Work with at least one state survey agency to develop a data-driven, two-day targeted recertification survey that will help agencies improve overall capacity, focus on nursing homes with a history of quality challenges or non-compliance, and respond to resident needs and specific complaints more promptly.
7. Increasing Transparency and Accountability of Ownership Data: Design and pilot a nationally applicable blueprint for ownership transparency that makes meaningful data available and accessible.
8. Developing a Nursing Home Health Information Technology (IT) Readiness Guide: Develop an interactive guide to help nursing home providers navigate evolving data and payment requirements, expectations, and digital capabilities, while building a case for federal incentives for nursing home health IT adoption.
9. Financing Household Models and Physical Plant Improvements: Promote policies in one or more states and with one or more federal agencies to introduce incentives for and investment in nursing home physical plant improvements and conversion to household models.

Over the next year, the Coalition intends to carry out as many of the plans as possible, advocate for policy reforms, and pilot test quality improvement approaches. They are also hosting webinars on their action plans throughout the summer. Registration links are available on the Coalition website here. More information about the Coalition is available here and here.

Contact: Karen Lipson, klipson@leadingageny.org