Do We Want to Measure the Quality of Care for Vulnerable Older People? The ACOVE Approach. Syracuse Seminar on Aging

There's limited information available about measuring the quality of medical care that is targeted to the needs of older patients. And there's very limited pressure on the system to provide high quality geriatric care. Why is that? Because the quality measures haven't been adequately developed and implemented, and it's more difficult to measure care for an older sample. Measuring care for ill older adults is complex, because they tend to have multiple medical conditions, and they demonstrate substantial variation in goals for care (Wenger and colleagues 2007). The Assessing Care of Vulnerable Elders (ACOVE) project began in 1998 as a collaboration between RAND Health and Pzizer Inc to develop and apply quality indicators (QIs) for assessment and treatment targeted at vulnerable older persons. The project involved defining and identifying the target population, identifying health conditions that cover much of the medical care provided to this population, developing quality-of-care indicators to measure how well those conditions are being addressed, and applying thoseindicators to determine the actual quality of care received by older adults.