Monitoring the outcomes of quality of care in nursing homes using administrative data

Routinely-collected administrative data and Cox's proportional hazards models are used to compare outcomes of care while controlling for age, sex and dependency level. The results indicate that the overall quality of nursing home care in Manitoba is good but that residents in certain regions and in certain types of nursing homes have specific outcomes that are poorer than others. These outcome indicators must not be treated as definitive signs of poorer care but as ''triggers'' suggesting a need for a closer look because the methodology and outcomes used in this study are still in the experimental stage. The results also indicate that secondary data provide a relatively inexpensive starting point for evaluating outcomes of nursing home care.