Health care reform and nursing homes

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by Denise Tyler, PhD, in the Health Busines Blog
Dr Tyler is an Investigator in the Center for Gerontology & Health Care Research at Brown University. She is the project manager for the Shaping Long-Term Care in America Project, a five-year, $10 million project funded by the National Institute on Aging that aims to improve nursing home care in the US by examining how market factors and state policies affect the quality of care delivered in the country’s 15,000+ nursing homes.

Millions of Americans live in nursing homes and millions more receive short-term care from one after a hospital stay. But the current health care reform debate has largely ignored nursing home care.

This is due, in part, to a lack of data about how and why that care is given.

As we move ahead with health care reform, we must understand how nursing homes are being utilized, what kinds of patients live in them, and what the outcomes are for the people who rely on them for care.

This matters because health care reform will likely be paid for in large part, by reductions in current health care spending. And the majority of these reductions will come from the Medicare program and nursing homes will likely be the target of these spending reductions.

Until now, there has been no resource for accessing information about nursing homes and those they care for. A new Web site that provides this information for the first time, www.LTCfocUS.org, has been developed by the Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research at Brown University.
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