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Qualis Health, the QIO for Washington and Idaho, conducted an outreach campaign targeted at dually enrolled Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries with diabetes stressing the importance of dilated eye exams. In a series of display ads in local ethnic newspapers in Chinese, Korean, and English, Qualis urged people who are dually enrolled to seek an eye exam at no cost. Poster-sized copies of the ads were placed in community centers, health offices, and other locations. Qualis also met with providers and practitioners to review data on dually enrolled diabetics and asked them to commit to improving rates of eye exams for this population. These efforts helped increase the rate of eye exams by 5.0 percentage points among the dually-enrolled population, reducing the disparity with the general Medicare population by 3.7 points. The Idaho QIO, Qualis Health, worked with two rural hospitals to reduce the disparity between patients at rural and urban hospitals who receive timely antibiotics. While the statewide percentage for urban hospitals remained constant at 59% during the study period, the two rural hospitals working with Qualis Health increased their rates from 45% to 73%. Qualis Health, the QIO for Idaho, worked with 59 nursing homes across the state to reduce the percentage of long-term residents reporting moderate to severe pain from 18% in spring 2002 to 8% in spring 2004. Qualis Health, the QIO for Idaho, worked with 14 rural hospitals in the state to improve care for patients with acute myocardial infarction or pneumonia: acute MI patients given aspirin early after admission rose from 78% to 92%, pneumonia patients receiving timely antibiotics increased from 78% to 91%, appropriate selection of antibiotics increased from 90% to 100%, smoking cessation counseling rose from 0 to 54% among acute MI patients and from 9% to 100% among pneumonia patients.

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