Research Seeks to Correlate IT Usage, Nursing Home Quality

The University of Missouri School of Nursing has received a grant of nearly $1 million from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to study IT adoption in nursing homes nationwide.

The grant will help Greg Alexander, associate professor in the MU Sinclair School of Nursing, further his preliminary research in Missouri and expand his study to a national level, according to the university. The last national study of IT in nursing homes was completed nearly a decade ago, Alexander noted.

He said the research would track 10 percent of all U.S. nursing homes’ IT usage for the next three years. “We will track survey responses each year and analyze how trends in IT adoption levels correlate with nursing home quality measures, such as the number of residents with urinary tract infections, pressure ulcers and pain,” Alexander said in a prepared statement.

One goal is to determine which IT capabilities lead to high-quality care in order to benchmark best practices of IT implementation in nursing homes throughout the country.

Alexander also hopes the results of his study will influence the science of nursing home quality measurement by incorporating IT as a variable in these quality measurement systems.