The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) Program is dedicated to improving the quality of health care at the community level. Hospital Quality Improvement Contractors (HQICs) are strategic partners of the QIO Program dedicated to improving the quality of care delivered to people with Medicare in hospitals.

A 96-bed, in-patient rehabilitation and nursing facility was referred by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to Quality Insights, a CMS Quality Innovation Network-Quality Improvement Organization (QIN-QIO), for assistance with increasing its resident COVID-19 vaccination rate.

A medium-sized nursing facility in Missouri was referred by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to Health Quality Innovators (HQI), a CMS Quality Innovation Network-Quality Improvement Organization (QIN-QIO), for assistance with improving its resident COVID-19 vaccination rate. The facility serves individuals with psychological behavior issues and many of the residents have public administrators assigned to them as guardians. Due to COVID-19 misinformation, a number of guardians refused vaccines for the residents whose care they managed.

Quality Insights’ goal is to provide support and meaningful webinar content to nursing homes. To meet this goal and to identify innovative ways to provide weekly COVID-19 infection control and vaccination/booster education to nursing homes, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Quality Innovation Network-Quality Improvement Organization (QIN-QIO) created a three-part webinar series intended to help nursing homes use their Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement (QAPI) plan to improve resident COVID-19 booster rates.

After years of steady improvement in hospital-acquired conditions, the COVID-19 pandemic brought hospitalization surges, staffing shortages, and family visitation limits that worsened patient outcomes. Convergence, a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Quality Improvement Contractor (HQIC), set out to better understand what contributed to the rise in hospital-associated harm at the beginning of the pandemic and how such harms could be prevented in the future.