COMPARATIVE EVALUATION OF NURSING HOMES

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The nursing home industry has come under increasing pressure to contain costs and improve quality. We propose to develop a software product that will enable managers of nursing home chains or managers of individual facilities to perform comparative evaluations of the performance of nursing homes. With this product, they will be able to use public data on cost, utilization, and quality to find out how they rate compared to their peers and then set targets for improvement. The software product will be based on Data Envelopment Analysis, a mathematical technique for comparing "decision-making units" using several performance measures. Although Data Envelopment Analysis has been applied to the nursing home industry as a research tool, we propose to make Data Envelopment Analysis an operational tool, accessible to people with little knowledge of the underlying technique. In Phase I, we built a prototype of this product as a spreadsheet add-on and used it to experiment with data from nursing homes in Massachusetts. Based on this experience, we developed a methodology for guiding users through the various steps of the analysis. We propose now to develop a nationwide database of state and federal data on nursing homes along with a full-fledged software product incorporating our methodology.