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60 Essential Forms for Long-Term Care Documentation PPS Alert for Long-Term Care

Editor's note: This week's edition of Ask SNFInfo includes an excerpt of an article titled "Take the first step toward transition: Start using MDS 3.0 interviews" from the May 2008 issue of PPS Alert. Expect more helpful tips and advice from PPSA in every issue to come!

During the January Special Open Door Forum on the MDS 3.0, project investigators painted a rosy picture of a streamlined assessment tool, stating that the 3.0 reduced the average completion time by 45% for a full MDS (62 minutes for the 3.0 vs. 112 minutes for the 2.0) during the national clinical validation study. The interview items appeared to significantly contribute to that time savings.

For example, completing the MDS 3.0 pain interview items took about three minutes on average. How is that possible? When a resident completes the interview, the assessor documents the responses on the MDS and moves on to the next item. The additional work of scouring the chart and interviewing staff members and family for additional information is removed from the process as long as the resident can complete the interview, says Rena R. Shephard, MHA, RN, RAC-MT, C-NE, founding chair and executive editor of the American Association of Nurse Assessment Coordinators and president of RRS Healthcare Consulting Services in San Diego.

However, the real-world implementation of all of the 3.0 interviews could significantly affect the MDS process in facilities in which a single MDS coordinator handles a high volume of MDSs by focusing on paper compliance, says Boyer. “The MDS 3.0 will force MDS coordinators out of their offices to the resident’s bedside,” she says. “They are going to have no choice but to be at the bedside asking questions. Consequently, facilities really need to think about decentralizing and having more than one person doing the assessment process for all of the nursing sections of the MDS. I don’t think it is going to work well if the facility expects one nurse to do a mammoth volume of MDSs with the 3.0.”