OPTICS Tool

Older Persons' Transitions in Care Success (OPTICS)

To date, little attention has been devoted to developing measures that could address the quality of care transitions from Nursing Homes to Emergency Departments. No tool exists that can specifically be used by Nursing Home residents and that gathers the information needed for decision-makers and managers who need data for quality management. By defining multiple perspectives of successful and unsuccessful transitions, we are developing and testing OPTICS - a practical tool to assess transition success, in terms of quality of care and avoidable complications.

Members of our research team have previously constructed instruments to measure contextual factors in nursing homes that influence care outcomes. In that work we established two criteria for such a measure: (1) feasibility (brevity and ease of completion; the instrument can be completed in 10-15 minutes), and (2) modifiability (focus on concepts that are potentially modifiable). We will apply these criteria when we develop the OPTICS tool to measure success of residents' care transitions.