KEY FINDINGS: A nursing home report card that converted 12 measures of quality into a simple 5-star system significantly affected consumer demand for low- and high-scoring facilities. One-star facilities typically lost 8 percent of their market share and 5-star facilities gained more than 6 percent of their market share. These results support the use of summary measures in report cards. After adjusting for other variables, the researchers found that the report card was associated with a relative reduction in market share of 8 percent for 1-star facilities and an increase in market share of 6.4 percent in 5-star facilities, but relatively small changes in market share for the 2-, 3-, or 4-star facilities. THE QUESTION. Although nursing home ratings have been publicly available since 2002, initially they had little impact on consumer choices. The original report cards in Nursing Home Compare presented consumers with a large amount of information, which can be difficult to understand. In December 2008, Medicare converted its nursing home report card to a 5-star summary rating. In this study, LDI Senior Fellows Rachel Werner and Daniel Polsky, and their colleague R. Tamara Konetzka, tested whether this change was associated with a change in consumer demand for nursing homes related to the nursing home's star rating after the summary information was released. Health Services Research, February 2016, Online First.
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