Medicare's new online Nursing Home Compare search engine falls short of making the kind of comparisons you'll really need to make an informed decision, but experts say it is a good start.

What's probably more valuable than the nursing home comparison engine is the wealth of guidance the Medicare Web site feature offers to help you make a nursing home decision off line.

"This is a potentially valuable tool," says Faith Mullen, an analyst with AARP's Public Policy Institute.

"But the data available here are no substitute for visiting a facility in person and talking with the staff as well as families of residents," she added.

Nursing Home Compare provides quality indicator information on 17,000 nursing homes that are Medicare or Medicaid certified. The information is as detailed as revealing the percentage of long-term residents in physical restraints and the percentage unable to perform basic daily tasks. Other indictors show the percentage with bedsores, pain and infections.

For each nursing home, the service also includes the number of beds, type of ownership, summary information about the last state inspection and information about the number of registered nurses, licensed practical or vocational nurses, and nursing assistants.

AARP complained, however, that there are no comparative numbers for the level of staffing. The quality of care can suffer when there isn't sufficient staffing.

An AARP Bulletin reports that other critics say each nursing home is responsible for reporting its own quality indictors, but without sufficient staffing to identify certain problems, it cannot accurately report the full extent of a given problem.

What's more, AARP cites a General Accounting Office report that said 17 percent of nursing homes listed online had four or more positive indicators with no highly negative scores. That could mislead online visitors into believing they are good homes.

All the homes with high ratings had been cited by state authorities for practices that did physical harm to residents, according to the GAO report.

The Medicare online service's extensive nursing home information content helps fill the gap in its comparison shortcomings.

The content includes

Published: January 9, 2003

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Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services. The DeadlineNews Group includes the website, DeadlineNews.com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home, Nolo, and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.

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