Personal Injury Law

New Website to Help Families Learn About Nursing Homes

By Billy Cunningham

The National Citizens for Nursing Home Reform (http://www.nccnhr.org/ ), a consumer advocacy group for nursing home residents and caregivers in nursing, homes, announced that the Brown University Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research has introduced a website designed for nursing home researchers that provides data on nursing home care in the US. The website states that its goal is to allow researchers to trace relationships between state policies, local market forces and the quality of long-term care and enable policymakers to craft state and local guidelines that promote high-quality, cost-effective, equitable care for older Americans. NCCNHR believes the site will also be enthusiastically received by many consumer advocates looking for detailed data and more sophisticated comparison tools than provided on other website such as 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 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.

The website provides the type information that users can employ to choose up to five variables. It allows the user 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," NCCNHR recommends that consumer go to this site to perform their researches about nursing homes in their areas before placing a loved one there. The more you can know about your options for placing loved one in a nursing home , the better equipped you'sll be to help prevent any nursing home negligence or abuse.

Full post as published by Mobile Personal Injury Lawyer on November 14, 2009 (boomark / email).