Supporting Nursing Homes During a Pandemic: Lessons From a Quality Improvement Collaborative

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed an enormous burden on nursing facilities in a system that was already fragile. To assist area nursing facilities with COVID-related challenges, Sunil Kripalani, MD, MSc, a hospitalist physician, implementation scientist, and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Health Services Research, garnered state funding (overseen now by the Tennessee Health Facilities Commission) to form a collaborative to support quality improvement (QI) efforts. Our project is called the Quality Improvement Collaborative for COVID-19 Prevention and Control in Middle Tennessee Nursing Homes.