Development of a web-based quality indicators monitoring system for long-term care facilities

Population aging is an important issue in Taiwan. The percentage of elderly members of the population has been growing quickly during recent years. The requirements of long-term care for chronic and functionally impaired patients are rapidly increasing. Beside medical treatment, the needs of long-term care facilities are also continuously increasing. Among the variants of long-term care institutions, the quality of healthcare service varies widely and lacks an objective assessment indicator. In order to manage healthcare quality, Taiwan Long Term Care Association has defined six quality indicators including number of falls, nosocomial infections, use of physical restraints, non-planned weight gain or loss, pressure ulcers and non-planned transfers to acute hospitals. In order to facilitate, collect and calculate the indicators, the Association cooperates with us to implement a service system. The architecture of the system has four components including Data Collection Subsystem, Report Generation Subsystem, Aggregation and Analysis Subsystem and System Administration Subsystem. In this paper, we introduce and share our experience of the system's development.