Health Care Needs in Assisted Living: Survey Data May Underestimate Chronic Conditions

Research using electronic and administrative databases has become increasingly common in post-acute and long-term care—so much so that its use has been conjectured to surpass that based on primary purposive data collection.1 The benefits of these databases include the large number of observations they contain and the relative ease with which they can be accessed. Data from the National Nursing Home Survey enabled widescale research on nationally representative US samples over more than 30 years,2 and the availability of the Minimum Data Set (MDS) in 19913 expanded nursing home research across the globe; to date, PubMed shows more than 1200 research papers have been published using MDS data.