Dan Osterweil, MD, FACP, CMD | CALTCM President

As we count down to our annual meeting, I want to take a moment to thank you for the opportunity to serve as the Association’s president. The last three years were marked by exciting opportunities and challenges for everyone in long term care. Despite the looming budget cuts, we have all joined together to find ways to improve how we deliver care. CALTCM has taken a leadership role in pushing a new concept- Performance Improvement Education (PIE) in lieu of the traditional CME. What defines PIE is a desire to improve performance by implementing appropriate care processes and quality improvement methods.

I am encouraged by the response from the LTC community, led by CAHF, to our initiative to train Nursing Home teams in reducing acute hospital admissions utilizing the INTERACT II method. The Quality Improvement Collaborative, a group of statewide stakeholders that are involved in education and training in LTC, rallied to our call to collaborate. The group has reached a consensus that it is time to work together and leverage our resources to reach a higher level of performance. To date, we have trained more than 200 team members from approximately 70 nursing homes on the implementation of INTERACT. This coming summer we are offering two more courses in collaboration with the CAHF QI conference in August and September.

Our 2011 annual meeting focused on the management of Dementia, Depression and Diabetes, three chronic conditions that have a huge impact on the elderly and their families, and conditions that involve use of medications that carry potential harm. Last year’s conference was the first time we have offered technical assistance in implementing Depression management to a selected number of nursing homes. This was made possible thanks to our long collaboration with the California Geriatric Education Center at UCLA. The model we developed for our educational sessions is a cutting-edge Performance Improvement method, linking education with quality improvement. This gives our annual symposia a whole new meaning and energizes us to do better by implementing what we have learned into practice.

All this was made possible by dedicated staff, active Board members and committees that have worked tirelessly on planning and fundraising to make our events available to you at a reasonable and affordable cost. Our board is possibly the only AMDA chapter that adopted the policy of Give or Get as a Board membership obligation. The Give or Get program means that we all are committed to CALTCM and we are willing to put our wallets where our mouths are. I want to thank SCAN Health Plan for its generous support in our PIE endeavor. The future is challenging, but I believe that with 400+ members we can join our energy and wisdom with the desire to do good by our patients, and we can make a major impact and make California’s LTC system a better one. In the coming years, professionals will need to refer to reliable sources to guide their practices; CALTCM and AMDA are reliable resources for us all.

As I step down as the president, I hand a bigger and stronger organization to our incoming president Dr. James Mittelberger. I will continue providing support and working with all of you as CALTCM’s executive director.