New Website Opens to Compare Nursing Home Quality

CALTCM members may recall that for several years, Dr. Charlene Harrington and her team at University of California, San Francisco published a website, CalQualityCare that compared California nursing homes and other long-term care organizations on quality of care including information such as staffing, organizational characteristics, and deficiencies and fines.  In 2016 the website lost its funding and had to shut down. 

In 2021, a new funding source, Cal Healthcare Compare (formerly Cal Hospital Compare or CHC) took over the website with plans to renew and reopen a website based on the old CalQualityCare.  The University of California, Davis was awarded the contract to lead the data analysis for the website.  The UC Davis project is led by Co-PIs Deb Bakerjian, PhD, APRN, FAAN, a Professor of Nursing, a national expert in nursing homes, and a former CALTCM President and Patrick Romano, MD, MPH, a Professor of Medicine, and nationally recognized expert in quality measures.  Drs. Romano and Bakerjian also are the co-Editors-in-Chief of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) online journal PSNet (https://psnet.ahrq.gov/)

Cal Long Term Care Compare (CLTCC) is now open and has begun to publish publicly available quality information on multiple measures for nursing home provider organizations that contract with Medicare.  Currently, the CLTCC site only provides data on California nursing homes, but the CHC group is working on funding to also include hospices, home health agencies, assisted living and residential care providers, adult day care, adult day health care, and intermediate care for the intellectually disabled at a later date. 

The primary audience for the CTLCC website is consumers to support decision-making and monitoring quality of care provided by nursing home providers. This implies the website must be easy to understand and navigate, as well as support accurate interpretation of performance information (e.g., better performance, directionality, significance of performance variation) by a non-technical audience. Other stakeholders and secondary audiences include nursing homes themselves as an accountability and improvement tool, policymakers and regulators, health plans, hospitals who refer patients, consumer advocates and other organizations.

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Comments on "New Website Opens to Compare Nursing Home Quality"

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Dan Osterweil - Sunday, April 03, 2022
2001314023

Congratulations to California and thanks to Drs Bekerjian and Romano for taking on the role of editors. This website be one the source of truth for California’s NH quality. It should be the duty of CALTCM members to engage with UCDavis team and advocate for enhencements when these are called for. One enhencement should be listing the facility ‘s medical director credentials, calling out facilities with medical director who do have CMD. I would advocate for listing these who are CALTCM members as a badge of honor for their efforts to advance their knowledge in managing the complexities of the SNF.

Dan Osterweil - Sunday, April 03, 2022
2001314023

Congratulations to California and thanks to Drs Bekerjian and Romano for taking on the role of editors. This website be one the source of truth for California’s NH quality. It should be the duty of CALTCM members to engage with UCDavis team and advocate for enhencements when these are called for. One enhencement should be listing the facility ‘s medical director credentials, calling out facilities with medical director who do have CMD. I would advocate for listing these who are CALTCM members as a badge of honor for their efforts to advance their knowledge in managing the complexities of the SNF.

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