Concepts Issues and Standards. Standards for Medical Hardware Software and Information Exchange: Standard and Non-Standardized Data Bases in Long Term Care

摘要

The Resource Utilization Groups (RUG-II), a case mix payment system for long term care facilities in New York State, is a highly structured and standardized data base. By mandating the electronic submission of data elements, the RUG-II forced computerization of nursing homes. As this data base has to be maintained, we visualized it as the core to which other data bases could be related. Examination of Federal and State mandate functions which regulate nursing homes identified a series of data bases that ranged from being structured and standardized to being unstructured. The data bases in these functions are open to computerization and can be related to the RUG-II clinical data for research, administrative and quality assurance purposes.