Evaluation of data quality of interRAI assessments in home and community care

Abstract

BackgroundThe aim of this project is to describe the quality of assessment data regularly collected in home and community, with techniques adapted from an evaluation of the quality of long-term care data in Canada.MethodsData collected using the Resident Assessment Instrument – Home Care (RAI-HC) in Ontario and British Columbia (BC) as well as the interRAI Community Health Assessment (CHA) in Ontario were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson’s r correlation, and Cronbach’s alpha in order to assess trends in population characteristics, convergent validity, and scale reliability.ResultsResults indicate that RAI-HC data from Ontario and BC behave in a consistent manner, with stable trends in internal consistency providing evidence of good reliability (alpha values range from 0.72-0.94, depending on the scale and province). The associations between various scales, such as those reflecting functional status and cognition, were found to be as expected and stable over time within each setting (r values range from 0.42-0.45 in Ontario and 0.41-0.43 in BC). These trends in convergent validity demonstrate that constructs in the data behave as they should, providing evidence of good data quality. In most cases, CHA data quality matches that of RAI-HC data quality and shows evidence of good validity and reliability. The findings are comparable to the findings observed in the evaluation of data from the long-term care sector.ConclusionsDespite an increasingly complex client population in the home and community care sectors, the results from this work indicate that data collected using the RAI-HC and the CHA are of an overall quality that may be trusted when used to inform decision-making at the organizational- or policy-level. High quality data and information are vital when used to inform steps taken to improve quality of care and enhance quality of life. This work also provides evidence that a method used to evaluate the quality of data obtained in the long-term care setting may be used to evaluate the quality of data obtained through community-based measures.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12911-017-0547-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Evaluation of a staff training programme to reimplement a comprehensive health assessment

“…A study of RAI-MDS 2.0 assessments completed in Ontario postacute care hospitals and residential long-term care facilities found that the data that were collected were of high quality 2. Similarly, the quality of the data collected using the Resident Assessment Instrument-Home Care, the counterpart assessment of the RAI-MDS 2.0 for use in home care settings, was also found to be strong 14…”

Comparing Changes and Transitions of Home Care Clients in Retirement Homes and Private Homes

“…The DRS uses 7 items from the RAI-HC to construct a scale from 0 to 14, with higher scores representing stronger indication of depressive illness. A cut-point of 3 or greater for the DRS was adopted as evidence of possible depressive illness that is consistent with other studies of this population (Hirdes, Mitchell, Maxwell, & White, 2011;Hogeveen, Chen, & Hirdes, 2017).…”

The interRAI Suite of Mental Health Assessment Instruments: An Integrated System for the Continuum of Care

“…To appraise this, interRAI has a long history of engaging in inter-rater reliability testing of its assessment systems (142,143,191,(241)(242)(243)(244)(245)(246)(247)(248). The approach used has been to conduct independent assessments of service recipients without contact between the assessors and with a limited time gap between assessments.…”

“…The patterns of associations in a dataset can provide insights about whether the instrument measures what one thinks it measures. The initial version of the MH was successfully evaluated by examining the presence of expected associations with age of cognitive loss and functional decline, the relationship between depression measures in suicide related indicators, readmission rates and problems with medication management, and cognitive performance with behavior (248).…”