New website offers consumers information on nursing home quality
April 2022
A newly launched website, Cal Long Term Care Compare (CLTCC), gives California consumers useful information to compare nursing home quality.
CLTCC centralizes publicly available information from federal and state agencies about nursing homes in California, offering metrics covering staffing, quality of facilities, fines and other quality information. The website's data and ratings will be updated on a bi-annual basis. While consumers are the target audience, CLTCC will be useful to other stakeholders including nursing home providers, hospitals referring patients, policymakers, regulators, health plans and nonprofit organizations.
Data analysis for CLTCC is led by members and staff of the UC Davis Center for Healthcare Policy and Research (CHPR). The project’s Co-PIs are Deb Bakerjian, clinical professor at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis Health, and Patrick Romano, professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at UC Davis Health who also serves on CHPR’s leadership team.
“When consumers need to compare nursing homes in their area, they should be able to look at them side-by-side and see which nursing homes are a better fit for their needs and of higher quality,” said Bakerjian. “Some patients who go into nursing homes have special needs so it’s important for us to show a particular nursing home has the capacity to address those needs.”
While CLTCC is currently focused on California nursing homes, Bakerjian and Romano say a future expansion could cover assisted living providers, hospices, home health agencies and other long-term care organizations.
“This is an area where consumers need a lot of help to make well-informed choices; we hope to offer useful quality information across the full spectrum of long-term care providers,” said Romano.
Funded by California health plans and foundations, the CLTCC website was created by Cal Healthcare Compare, a multi-stakeholder nonprofit. Learn more in a California Association of Long Term Care Medicine blog post by Bakerjian: “New Website Opens to Compare Nursing Home Quality.”