Dynamic assessment is a technique that nursing home staff can use to perform continuous functional assessment, with immediate feedback that alters and refines the assessment process on the basis of clinical judgments as they are entered. While addressing specific shortcomings in all existing chronic care assessment methods, the new technique also extends beyond the minimal, basic assessment to encompass in-depth assessment, a follow- on process that is rarely automated, at present, and never tightly integrated with the basic screening assessment process. Our Phase I research focused mainly on evaluating the extent to which dynamic assessment can collect more data while simultaneously reducing the burden of assessment. The Phase II research, in contrast, will test our hypothesis that dynamic assessment can build a clinical profile which is no less accurate than conventional methods at any time and significantly more complete almost all of the time. Besides confirming that dynamic assessment is just as accurate and also more comprehensive, the research data should validate the heuristics for continuous assessment and also serve as the basis for computing reliability metrics.
The dynamic assessment method collects more data and data of more different types. At the same time, it reduces the burden of assessment, and might also improve reliability, by collecting in-depth data only when the screening data collected earlier show a need for it. This additional data can be used to automate clinical protocols, greatly extending the scope of the assessment. Besides collecting more data with less effort, dynamic assessment allows an event driven approach to continuous functional assessment that can provide a complete clinical profile at all times, not just on the few days when a full assessment was completed.
