23. The long-term care component of the Massachusetts Cooperative Health Statistics Program

The Office of Health Planning and Statistics of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, with the support of the National Center for Health Statistics, has over the past two years established two data programs in long-term care. The first of these involves experimentation with large-scale collection of patient-specific data from long-term care facilities, with the goal of developing statistically valid algorithms to predict the most appropirate level of care for individual patients. The second program has been the development of a data base for home health care agencies, the elements of which are an agency-specific annual statistical report and a patient-specific discharge abstract program. These two programs mark an effort to document home health care activities so as to provide a base of information for program development and evaluation.