Quality indicators for integrated care of dysphagia in hospital settings

This article proposes a panel of quality indicators for the management of swallowing rehabilitation (SR) therapy in a hospital setting. There were four stages in developing these indicators: identifying procedures to be managed; generating indicators and standardizing data collection; identifying the correlation among indicators; and formulating the panel of indicators. The following 12 quality indicators were developed: swallowing evaluation index; individual care index; speech-language pathologist (SLP) care index; number of assisted patients index; severity rate; swallowing diagnosis rate per hospital unit; swallowing rehabilitation demand index; time until first swallowing evaluation; SLP index per hospital bed; time until removal of feeding tube; time until reintroduction of oral feeding; and time until decannulation. The proposed indicators were designed to improve the management of dysphagia in a hospital setting. Measuring these indicators is essential to understanding the patient's needs and providing quality care. Managing care using these indicators will make it easier to track the patient's rehabilitation process, measure the effectiveness of new therapeutic processes and technologies, and evaluate the performance of hospital units relative to other providers in the area. The management of SR using quality indicators allows the effectiveness and efficiency of rehabilitation programs to be clearly evaluated.