Abstract
The dramatic changes in health care during the last decade encouraged nurses to measure the effectiveness of their practice. In addition, the shift to a Prospective Payment System in 2000 forced home health care agencies to become more cost efficient while demonstrating improved patient care outcomes. Tools to measure outcomes include the Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) and the Omaha System. As part of the federally mandated, outcome-based, quality monitoring process, home health agencies use the collected OASIS data to identify target areas of service or care that indicate a need for improvement and compare their data to other home care agencies. This article describes how a home health agency in Wisconsin successfully integrated OASIS and Omaha System data into its performance improvement program to measure patient outcomes using data about surgical wounds as an exemplar.
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