INTERNET-BASED DISSEMINATION OF NLTCS DATA

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The National Long Term Care Survey (NLTCS) collects longitudinal data on persons aged 65 and older about their Long-Term Care (LTC) status. The Center for Demographic Studies (CDS) at Duke University distributes Public Use Files (PUF) and Analytical Files of these data, designed for estimating claim costs for Home and Community Based LTC insurance policies. These files and the research results from the NLTCS do not receive wide distribution, and are not easily accessible to non-technical users. Also the analysis steps for preparing Analytical Files are very time consuming, and this delays the distribution of data. Informed Decisions, Inc., (ID) is developing software for generating Dynamic Hypercubes (DH) with data from any relational database, and post them on the Internet. Non-technical users will be able to do interactively simple analyses and generate many tables from one DH. The DHs will also be applied to optimize data cleaning and analyses steps for the Analytical Files. Duke University CDS will be responsible for providing ID with expert input on the NLTCS and the interface of the survey with the software procedures being developed and applied in Phase I. The final product will be general enough for application to practically any database.