The Nursing Home Screener, an NLM project to help people locate and screen nursing homes on-line for quality, won a Distinguished Paper Award at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2008 symposium in November.

It is being developed for older Americans looking for a home for themselves or spouse, and for social workers, nurses, physicians and other caregivers who may be searching for a nursing home.

Users will be able to display multiple nursing homes in a selected area on a Google map, and survey them in four categories: staffing, fire safety, healthcare deficiencies, and quality of care (inferred from residents’ health). The quality measures come from publicly available information which federally funded nursing homes must provide to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

George Thoma, PhD, Chief of the Communications Engineering Branch in NLM’s Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications co-authored the award-winning paper with principal author Glenn Pearson, PhD, and Michael Gill.