LTCFocus is a product of the Shaping Long-Term Care in America Project being conducted at the Brown University Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research and supported, in part, by the National Institute on Aging.

LTCfocus.org provides data on nursing home care in the US. Our goal is to allow researchers to trace relationships between state policies, local market forces, and the quality of long-term care and enable policymakers to craft state and local guidelines that promote high-quality, cost-effective, equitable care for older Americans.

New Home Health Data Available 9/27/24

We are pleased to announce the release of a new set of data: Home Health Focus. This comprehensive dataset allows researchers to examine and better understand home health agencies within the post-acute and long-term care system from 2016-2019. Variables are aggregated from the Home Health Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS), which is a standardized assessment tool completed by trained clinicians to measure outcomes for all adult Medicare beneficiaries who are receiving skilled home health services reimbursed by Medicare. 

We define unique home health stays as new OASIS start of care dates that span to the first OASIS discharge assessment. For outcome measures that are continually assessed throughout an individual's home health stay, we select the first non-missing value, unless otherwise specified in the accompanying data dictionary. The data includes information on both Traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage beneficiaries. Similar to the LTCFocus Nursing Home data, the Home Health files are aggregated at three yearly levels: home health agency, county, and state with county and state geography assigned according to the beneficiary's residence as recorded in the Master Beneficiary Summary File. Currently, calendar years 2016 through 2019 are available for download via the data page, using OASIS versions C and D. More information about OASIS data sets and user manuals can be found at https://www.cms.gov/medicare/quality/home-health 

Please feel free to reach out to us via the contact page with any questions or comments.

Newly Aggregated National-Level Data

9/18/23: We are happy to announce that the 2021 LTCFocus data is now available. We would like to give a huge thank you to Chris Santostefano for his work on this!

07/01/22: Now available for download on our Data webpage is a table of MDS 3.0 variables aggregated nationally, which includes all nursing home residents from the 50 states and the District of Columbia, by year. Values are currently posted from 2011 to 2020* and will continue to be extended as current and future years of data become available.

This table allows for direct comparisons of local/regional nursing home data to national averages using the same variable naming convention (included in our Data Dictionary) with the suffix _nat added. Because facility-, county-, and state-level files must be censored for small cell size, and also do not include Alaska or Washington DC, national averages calculated using the publicly available datasets may not exactly match the values listed in this table. These data were aggregated by person without censoring. We did not include measures that are already calculated at the facility-level (i.e., from OSCAR/CASPER) as these are uncensored and can be summarized using the existing data files.

*RUGS IV is no longer calculated by CMS as of October 1, 2019, which impacts the four LTCFocus variables marked "NA" in 2019 and/or 2020. We are still in the process of reconstructing our low-care definition, which relies upon the RUGS value. We will post these updated measures once we have validated the new algorithm.

PCTLOCARE Data Update

04/06/22: Our measure "pctlocare" has historically been developed using a case-mix variable (RUGS) that is no longer reported on the MDS after CMS modified their nursing home reimbursement model in October 2019. As a result, the existing low-care measure is only valid through 2019 and has been removed from the 2020 dataset. We are in the process of updating our low-care algorithm to be calculated without the RUGS case-mix variable. Once we have validated this new low-care measure, we will post it on our website. Please note that no other variables we provide were impacted by this change to the nursing home reimbursement model.

Spotlight on Our Work

A Systematic Review of Long-Term Care Facility Characteristics Associated with COVID-19 Outcomes

R. Tamara Konetzka et. al.

LTCFocus Data Spotlight

FACT SHEET: Protecting Seniors and People with Disabilities by Improving Safety and Quality of Care in the Nation’s Nursing Homes

The White House

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