The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA

Abstract #61339

Martin Kitchener, PhD, MBA¹, Janis O'Meara, MPA², Eric Collier, MS², John F. Schnelle, PhD³, Charlene Harrington, PhD¹, and Lisa P. Simon, MPH⁴. (1) Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, University of California San Francisco, 3333 California St, Suite 455, San Francisco, CA 94118, 415-502-7364, martink@itsa.ucsf.edu, (2) Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, UC San Francsico, 3333 California Street, Suite 455, San Francisco, CA 94118, (3) UCLA, 7150 Tampa Ave./JHA, Borun Center, Reseda, CA 91335, (4) California Healthcare Foundation, 476 Ninth St, Oakland, CA 94607

California Nursing Home Search is a web-based information system that provides comprehensive comparative data from federal and state public data sources. The primary goal of the California HealthCare Foundation in launching the system at www.Calnhs.org was to ensure that information about nursing facility (NF) quality was made available to a broad variety of stakeholders including: consumers, advocates, health professionals, policy makers, payers, the press, quality monitoring groups, and NF providers. This paper analyzes three sources of stakeholder feedback: (1) the press coverage around the launch in October 2002, (2) records of communications (emails, letters and telephone calls) received by the system developers, and (3) a series of meetings and legislative hearings that involved the researchers and senior state officials considering policy responses to CNHS. Content analysis of these sources provides illustrations of three broad categories of response: (1) intended outcomes (e.g., NF efforts to reduce the accumulation of deficiencies from state inspection surveys); (2) unintended ‘positive’ feedback e.g., some providers said that they became more aware of their staffing and deficiency citations from the system, and (3) unintended outcomes, e.g. challenges by facility operators of the basis and content of the data reported. Learning Objectives. From this session, participants should be able to: understand key stakeholders and their specific responses components of the system, identify intended and unintended outcomes, and draw lessons for the development of other quality reporting systems.

Learning Objectives:

• Learning Objectives. From this session, participants should be able to: understand key stakeholders and their specific responses components of the system, identify intended and unintended outcomes, and draw lessons for the development of other quality reporting systems.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.