Nursing home care has increasingly become an important aspect of health and social care. Comparative quality indicators of nursing home care provide a useful means of describing, evaluating, and improving nursing home care. This pilot project will initiate a series of important investigations to describe and analyze comparative quality indicators with a by-product being a new methodology. The results of this study will provide the groundwork for larger applications that advance the understanding of quality indicators in the nursing home.
The specific aims of this pilot project are as follows: 1. Determine nursing home specific outcome rates reflective of quality of care among a multi-state census of nursing homes. The particular outcomes that we will investigate are mortality, discharge to home, loss of physical function, weight loss, and worsening of pressure sores. The proposal's investigators chose these outcomes since they reflect the spectrum of quality outcomes important in the nursing home. 2. Risk-adjust the above outcome rates by patient characteristics. The investigators plan to determine how nursing home rankings by quality outcomes change after adjusting for nursing home case mix using data from the Minimum Data Set Plus (MDS+). 3. Determine how these outcome rates are related to one another. For example, are nursing homes with high levels of pressure sores the same nursing homes with high levels of weight loss? 4. Examine how structure and process characteristics of nursing homes such as size and staffing are related to both outcomes of high and low rate nursing homes. The investigators plan to use the Online Survey Certification and Reporting System (OSCAR) to obtain nursing home level information.
| Egleston, B L; Rudberg, M A; Brody, J A (1999) Prior living arrangements and nursing home resident admission ADL characteristics: a study of two states. J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci 54:S202-6 |
