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Abstract

Grant Number:	5R44AG017426-03
PI Name:	LENARD, MELANIE L.
PI Email:	mlenard@crystaldecisionsystems.com
PI Title:
Project Title:	Comparative Evaluation of Nursing Homes

Abstract: 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.

Thesaurus Terms:
computer program /software, computer system design /evaluation, health care cost /financing, health care facility information system, health care quality, health care service evaluation, health care service utilization, mathematics, nursing home
data management, nursing care quality
clinical research, health services research tag, human data

Institution:	CRYSTAL DECISION SYSTEMS
	1318 BEACON ST, STE 2
	BROOKLINE, MA 02446
Fiscal Year:	2003
Department:
Project Start:	01-SEP-1999
Project End:	31-AUG-2004
ICD:	NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON AGING
IRG:	ZRG1

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