More than 1.4 million Americans live in nursing homes today. By 2020, an estimated 12 million will need long-term care, whether in a nursing home, assisted living facility, chronic care hospital or from an at-home health service provider.
At this time of skyrocketing demand for long-term care, the National Institute on Aging has awarded Brown University a major grant to create the first research database aimed at improving the nation's long-term care system -- and the lives of the elderly who rely on that system to eat, take medications and carry out other tasks of daily living.
Vincent Mor, chairman of the Department of Community Health at Brown and a member of the University's Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research, is principal investigator on the five-year, $10-million grant. Mor and his team will take existing federal data on Medicare reimbursement claims, patient hospitalization rates and other data and combine it with new information the team will collect on the health status of residents, reimbursement rates for long-term care services, the organization of those services, and other topics from a random sample of 2,600 nursing homes across the country. The group will also collect information on relevant policies from all 50 states.
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