Interventions to Reduce Acute Care Transfers (INTERACT) is a quality improvement project designed to help reduce rates of unnecessary hospitalizations among nursing home residents. Nursing home staff use tools to identify changes in residents' health for six conditions that can lead to hospitalizations: dehydration, fever, mental status changes, heart failure, lower respiratory infections, and urinary tract infections. INTERACT’s paper-based tools have proven effective in trials, but they may have greater impact if they were integrated into nursing homes’ health information technology (HIT) systems. This Commonwealth Fund–supported study (Annals of Long Term Care, Nov. 10, 2011) examines the steps to doing so.
