The Malnutrition Care Score quality measure is available for 2025 hospital reporting.
Following your completion of this section, you will know how to:
It is important to continue to monitor performance beyond the initial implementation phase. Continuous evaluation and tracking of performance over time creates the opportunity to remove or modify practices that are no longer working or are not as effective as initially anticipated. Ongoing evaluation following the project’s conclusion gives teams an overall picture of nutrition care strengths or weaknesses and the opportunity to refine components of change in a targeted and systematic way for the future.
While you may not need to evaluate the quality measures/indicators as frequently as you did during your initial implementation of the initiative, regular assessment of the quality measures/indicators will enable your team to identify any declines in performance. In addition, there are a number of outcomes, such as infection rates and length of stay, that could be assessed once the workflow is fully established and there are sufficient data to support more accurate analyses.
To ensure you sustain your project gains over time, you are encouraged to create a Sustainability Team. This team can consist of Project Team members and do not necessarily need to be the clinician champions. The Sustainability Team will help collect data, evaluate progress and share findings with team members, and support refinements to the process as needed (e.g., re-education or additional training). The Sustainability Team may decide how frequently progress data will be reviewed; at a minimum, they are encouraged to evaluate performance on a quarterly basis.
While identifying where a quality improvement process can be refined is important, celebrating successes is also important. Acknowledge when your team has achieved positive results, regardless of how small, to encourage everyone to continue their good work.
In addition to celebrating successes and quality improvement, the Project Team should consider avenues for disseminating findings to other facilities within your health system or even externally. If you undertook your project at a single hospital in your health system, speak with your quality leader to determine the best way to share the project learnings with the rest of the health system. External dissemination, such as journal publications, conferences (e.g., state quality associations, Institute for Healthcare Improvement), or online forums (e.g., the AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange) are a great way to demonstrate your organization’s commitment to nutrition care quality to external stakeholders.
There are also healthcare quality excellence awards such as the John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Awards.[48] This not only advertises the success of the organization at effectively implementing a quality improvement program, but is a mechanism for disseminating best practices to other organizations and ultimately promoting the overall goal of the initiative—to advance high-quality patient- centered care for patients with malnutrition.
On this page:
MQii Toolkit:
These materials were developed by the Malnutrition Quality Improvement Initiative (MQii),
a project of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Avalere Health, and other stakeholders who
provided guidance and expertise through a collaborative partnership. Support provided by Abbott.
Members Area