AMDA Foundation - Growing Study Groups Continue Progress

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Vol XXI, Jan `06

Growing Study Groups Continue Progress

Vol XXI, January `06

When workgroups on five topics met during the AMDA Foundation's Research Network Fall Conference in Chicago last November, the number of active group members had grown--as had the scope of their efforts and their goals. The following is a summary of what the groups are doing. Watch the AMDA Foundation website and future issues of this newsletter for updates in the coming months.

Dental and Oral Care Workgroup. The group is working on a National Institutes of Health grant proposal--a joint proposal between AMDA, the AMDA Foundation, the Academy of Dentistry for Persons with Disabilities, and the American Society of Geriatric Dentistry--to describe the types and extent of oral and dental programs for the 1.5 million elderly and functionally dependent people in the nation's nursing homes; determine the factors that facilitate and hinder recognition of oral and dental problems; identify the barriers and disparities related to the assessment of oral and dental problems; and document the current state-of-the-art with respect to actual assessment and treatment of oral and dental problems in a national sample of nursing homes. The four-year study will involve a literature review, surveys, prospective study, resident chart reviews and interviews, and oral assessments. This study proposal is currently being reviewed by NIH.
Anemia in Long Term Care: Physician Attitudes to Approach and Management. This active group has developed three research proposals on this topic. The first involves a random survey of AMDA members; collection of data on co-morbid problems, lab tests/results, treatment offered, and more. The second involves a NIH/National Institute on Aging research grant proposal for more detailed, clinical research. The third proposal relates to a Delphi consensus, a survey of select experts relating to anemia and problems/challenges related to the disease. The group will be pursuing these ideas in the coming months. In the meantime, these researchers helped drive the development and publication of an AMDA clinical practice guideline on anemia.
Urinary Incontinence/Overactive Bladder. This group reviewed the results of four of their survey's aimed at identifying physician, DON, NP and NA attitudes about the relative importance of urinary incontinence with respect to evaluation and management, quality of life, and costs, as well as describing physician knowledge about evaluation and management of urinary incontinence in different clinical situations. Group members have determined to pursue a survey to examine associations between facility characteristics and performance on the UI intervention quality indicators. The group has established a set of questions and will be moving forward with its survey.
Centralized Database. This group has set as its goals the development of: an accurate and up-to-date database containing resident- and facility-specific information from a variety of clinical information systems that can be used for hypothesis testing, processes to allow the Research Network to add new content areas and to integrate elements from other databases as their importance is identified, and processes to enable a central database's use to support and refine research questions generated from the FPIN LTC panel. Group members have set and begun working on two key tasks: identifying sources of electronic data that could be used to develop a centralized database and considering what specific research questions could be answered through the use of a database containing identified data sources.
Diabetes. The study efforts of the diabetes workgroup were detailed in the last issue of this newsletter. The group shared their study results with Conference participants in November. In the meantime, they will be looking at additional activities and how the results of their survey can be translated into practice.