2007 NYS Webmasters' Guild "Best of the Web" Award Winners

2007 NYS Webmasters' Guild "Best of the Web" Award Winners

State Government: Department of Health Patient Safety Center for the New York State Nursing Home Profile Web Site: www.nursinghomes.nyhealth.gov

Site Information

Date Launched: December 12, 2006

Approximate Number of Monthly Unique Visitors: 33,813 unique visitors

Site Developers: New York State Department of Health Employees, Island Peer Review Organization (IPRO), Consultants, Voluntary Commenters and Testers

Summary and Background

Department of Health, Patient Safety Center, accepting the award is Robert Barnett, Director The New York State Nursing Home Profile Web Site highlights key nursing home quality measures, allowing the public to easily obtain important, up-to-date information about New York State's nursing homes, enabling those needing nursing home services and their families to make better decisions when choosing nursing home care. Its purpose is to enhance communication between patients and nursing home administrators and staff, making the health care decision process easier and more effective. The web site enables the public to: easily search for nursing homes of interest by name, region, county or selected distance within a chosen zip code; identify nursing homes providing special services such as adult care, respite care or services to children in need of long term care; compare nursing homes on the basis of up to 19 quality measures including the percent of residents whose need for help with daily activities has increased, the percent of residents given influenza vaccine during flu season and the percent of residents who were assessed and given pneumococcal vaccination; and obtain important and up-to-date information regarding nursing home inspection reports and complaint investigation history, as well as recent enforcement actions taken by the Department.

In preparing and presenting this information, which comes from multiple data sources, OFT technology standards and best practices were followed. The Web Site complies with Section 508, W3C WAI standards and U.S. Federal Government rules for Web-based content accessibility. This Web Site was written using XHTML 1.0 Transitional to maximize compatibility with all commonly used browsers. All updates to the Web Site are tested to ensure compliance with accessibility guidelines and standards.

The development of the New York State Nursing Home Profile Web Site was completed by a broad-based team of Department employees, with expertise in nursing home program content and web development; consultants with expertise in quality measures, database design, search engines and hosting capabilities. More specifically, the Department employees are:

Consultants from the Island Peer Review Organization are:

Additionally, and, in many respects, most importantly, is that the web team received important valuable feedback about the Web Site from voluntary user testers, as well as consumer and nursing home representatives and their constituents. Many Department employees, completely uninvolved in the Web Site development, volunteered to test the web-site-in-progress. Results from individual usability testing sessions were repeatedly fed back into the development process. Several consumer groups and their constituents were invited to preview and comment on the Web Site during its development stage. These groups included: AARP (formerly American Association of Retired Persons), Center for Medical Consumers, New York State Alliance for Retired Americans, Long Term Care Community Coalition, New York State Office for the Aging. Consumers and their constituents applauded the Web Site because it is a tool to assist New Yorkers in making the best choice possible in finding nursing home care for elders. They also felt that the Web Site, especially because of its user friendliness, would represent yet another step toward "consumer and patient empowerment."

Technology Overview

The site uses PHP to provide search functionality and presentation of some portions of the facility data. Other portions of the site are generated using Microsoft Access to output static XHTML pages. Additionally, the site uses Mapquest service to allow consumers to obtain driving directions to the facilities.

Functionality

Some of the data for this Web Site is stored in Microsoft Access. This was a problem because Access does not output accessible or valid XHTML. State staff came up with a unique solution of creating reports in Access that contain XHTML code. These reports are then saved as text files. The text files are then renamed to have a .htm extention. This allows Access to output valid XHTML by not using the built-in "save as HTML" feature.

Efficiencies Associated with this Site

Some of the content of this site was already being posted on the Department's Web Site. Rather than completely start from scratch this content was redesigned and made to fit into this new consumer-friendly Web Site.

Service to Customers

The intended audience for the New York State Nursing Home Profile Web Site is the public and, particularly, families and individuals who are in need of making the important decision of where a loved one may receive the best nursing home care possible. This Web Site was designed to provide families with tools and information to facilitate this decision-making. Individuals and families can go to this Web Site and select a county in New York State, for example, and a list of nursing homes accessible in that county will be provided. As this point, the user has a number of options including clicking on "Map Results" which will show the user where the nursing homes are located in the county. The user can then select any of the homes displayed on the map for a more detailed map with the option of obtaining driving directions as well. Alternatively, rather than displaying the nursing homes for a selected county on a map, the user has an option of obtaining a directory of the homes including names, addresses and phone numbers or compare the selected homes on the basis of one of 19 quality measures (provided by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services).

Another unique search feature is the ability to quickly identify nursing homes providing among 12 special services such as respite care (where an individual can go for short-term nursing care, on a temporary basis, to provide relief for his/her caregivers). Finding nursing homes that provide care to a pediatric population, another special service, is especially important for parents with children in need of long-term nursing care.

Lastly, a special effort was made to identify questions that the public should ask of a nursing home before making a final decision such as staffing or disposition and safeguarding of personal property. These important questions, and many others, are readily available on this Web Site for the public to see and download and take with them when visiting homes for potential placement of their loved one.

As previously mentioned, many of these unique attributes of the New York State Nursing Home Profile Web Site were developed and incorporated after many discussions with user testers and several consumer and industry representatives and their constituents. For example, several older individuals and members of AARP accompanied AARP leadership to preview and comment on this Web Site.

Contact:

Robert W. Barnett

Director

Department of Health Patient Safety Center

161 Delaware Avenue

Delmar, NY 12054

rwb02@health.state.ny.us

(518) 408-1219

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