Consumer Advocates Urged to Use New Data Source

The Brown University Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research has launched a website designed for nursing home researchers that will also be enthusiastically received by many consumer advocates looking for detailed data and more sophisticated comparison tools than provided on Nursing Home Compare.

The interactive database, www.LTCfocUS.org, incorporates information from a number of government sources-Medicare reimbursement claims, OSCAR (CMS’s Online Survey, Certification and Reporting system), the MDS (Minimum Data Set), and Brown’s own survey of state Medicaid policies. Vincent Mor, chairman of the Department of Community Health at Brown, was co-recipient of NCCNHR’s 2009 Public Service Award for his research on racial disparities in nursing homes; and he announced the impending launch of the website in his acceptance speech at the NCCNHR Annual Meeting Oct. 25. Mor demonstrated use of the database to identify racially disparate quality and access to care in two urban areas.

Users can interact with the website by creating interactive maps and tables with comparative information about states, counties, or individual nursing homes. All data provided on the website are also available to download.

Example of Use

Users can choose up to five variables, for example, to create a chart comparing all nursing homes in a state. The broad range of variables from which to choose includes number of beds; for-profit and chain status; percent of Medicare and Medicaid beds; Alzheimer’s units; occupancy rates; age ranges, gender and race of residents; direct care staffing (RN, LPN, CNA); acuity of care; certain MDS quality measures; source of admissions (hospital or home); and 30-day rehospitalization rates (a potential indicator of quality not found on Nursing Home Compare).

The website is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging-funded Shaping Long-Term Care in America project housed at the Brown center. While its stated purposes are to “allow researchers to trace clear relationships between state policies and local market forces and the quality of long-term care” and to allow policymakers “to craft state and local guidelines that promote high-quality, cost-effective, equitable care to older Americans,” Mor also encouraged consumer advocates to use the site.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Industry News, Misc.. The entry is tagged under You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.