Across Ontario, Canada, all long-term care homes are engaged in the implementation of the RAI-MDS 2.0, which will include the use of RAPs as an aid in analyzing residents’ care needs and critical thinking for making care decisions. According to the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (2005), there are notable deficiencies in most of the Resident Assessment Protocols (RAPs) that were performed in the nursing homes. Using the criteria for measuring the quality of clinical practice guidelines, the findings include poor validity, documentation, reliability and clinical applicability.
 A new product by MED e-Care, called the RAP Assessment tool is designed to allow homes to document a comprehensive assessment on all 18 RAPs. Considering that the process of systematically completing the MDS assessment and developing resident’s care plan is inherently complex because clinicians are expected to disseminate accurate information about MDS, this tool is automatically integrated with the MDS assessment and care planning application.
 With the RAP assessment tool, clinicians can benefit from the pre-population of data elements from the MDS assessment that trigger the RAP. It also populates factors that may cause, contribute to, or exacerbate the triggered condition. By having this function, members of the interdisciplinary team will be able to conveniently view the different factors related to the RAP and find associated causes and effects. Analysis of the MDS assessment findings can then be documented using this ingenious tool. This electronic evaluation tool is structured to capture:

• multiple factors associated with the problem
• whether multiple triggered conditions are related
• areas requiring more information to help with care decisions
• opportunities for rehabilitation
• need for referral to an expert
• goals for care planning

 Accurate and comprehensive documentation ensures continuity of care in order to achieve desired resident outcomes. This tool offers easy access to resident care plans and most importantly it will eliminate the task of having to enter the same information twice. The tool automatically generates the RAP Assessment Summary as soon as the RAP assessment is completed. The different sections of the RAP summary will populate appropriate areas of the care plan and progress notes. This will provide consistency in documentation and improve quality and efficiency in making care decisions that evolved from MDS evaluation. With the use of this tool, agonizing over RAPs may be a thing of the past.