A european project to devise a hospital admission case-mix system for elderly patients, plus a standardised method of recording hospital outcome

ACMEPLUS

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Type	HSR Project
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Startdate	03-2000
Enddate	05-2003
Summary	Objective: Many older people entering hospitals have multiple medical problems and disabilities, requiring mute-disciplinary assessment by health workers and social care services. Errors of assessment made at this key time may have important long-term implications for individuals and health and care services. For example, remediable conditions may be overlooked, and older people may lose their independence unnecessarily. European-wide comparative research is needed to improve quality of care and to reduce inequity in such patients. A standardised system for measuring case-mix and outcome is required, but no existing system has been designed for use early in the hospital admission. The ACMEPLUS Project aims to produce a brief, European-standardised system for measuring case-mix and outcome people aged 65 years and over recently admitted to non-surgical hospital specialities. The three-year project will use two Phases of data collection, with at least 200 patients being studied in each Phase by each of the eight participating centres. Over 3200 patients aged 65 years and over will have been evaluated by the end of the project. PHASE I will use a wide range of potential case-mix and outcome variables chosen as the result of (a) a Systematic Review of the literature, (b) previous work of two of the partners on casemix assessment plus a new (predominantly graphical) method of recording outcome, (c) an initial Consensus Conference of all partners. PHASE II will collect data using a subset of variables from Phase I. This subset of variables, which will be known as the ACMEplus instrument, will be selected by a combination of (a) a clinical consensus involving all the partners, which will be strongly influenced by (b) a series of statistical analyses of Phase 1 data Phase II will also establish the acceptability, feasibility, reliability and validity of the ACMEplus instrument translated into the languages of the participating centres.

Countries	Finland, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom
Sectors	Hospital
Topics	Effectiveness, Health Policy

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Last update date	09-26-2011 12:09