LTC Data Cooperative

About the Long-Term Care (LTC) Data Cooperative

The COVID-19 pandemic shined a spotlight on the data gap in long-term care. To address this need, the National Institute on Aging funded the Long-Term Care (LTC) Data Cooperative, a collaboration among providers and stakeholders in academia, government, and the private sector. The LTC Data Cooperative assembles resident data from the major long-term care electronic medical record (EMR) vendors.

These data serve four key purposes:

healthcare operations/population health analytics
public health surveillance
observational, comparative effectiveness research
clinical research studies

For approved research studies, electronic health record (EHR) data can be linked with Medicare claims and other data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via the NIA Data LINKAGE Program.

Mission

The mission of the Long-Term Care (LTC) Data Cooperative is to improve the quality of care within post-acute and long-term care facilities by compiling the most comprehensive data on post-acute and long-term care residents nationwide – and to translate these data into accessible and actionable information designed to help clinicians, managers and policy makers improve care.

Governance

This initiative is governed by the American Health Care Association (AHCA). Together with Brown University, a pioneer of research studies using integrated data on residents that have helped the long-term care community, this effort will assemble the largest and most comprehensive health records database from geographically and structurally diverse post-acute and long-term care facilities and residents.

2024-2025 Advisory Committee

Facility Members to ensure broad-based constituency representation and other adequate LTC experience:

Dr. Nancy Istenes, Chief Medical Officer, Saber Healthcare Group
Jennifer Roberts, Chief Reimbursement Officer, Aperion Care

AHCA Board of Governors Chair or designee:

Phil Scalo, CEO, Bartley Healthcare

AHCA Board of Governors Vice Chair or designee:

Chris Wright, CEO, iCare Health Network

AHCA Board of Governors Past Chair:

Phil Fogg, President, Marquis Companies

Representative from each of the Participating EMR Vendors:

Bill Charnetski, Executive Vice President, PointClickCare
Dudley Fetzer, Business Development, MatrixCare

AHCA Quality Cabinet Member Representative:

Debbie Meade, CEO, Health Management

AHCA Staff Government Relations Representative:

Clif Porter, Senior Vice President of Government Relations, AHCA

Academic Researcher:

Dr. Susan Hickman, Director, Indiana University Center for Aging Research, Regenstrief Institute

2024-2025 Public Health Surveillance Committee

Federal public health professional (Co-Chair):

Dr. Nimalie Stone, MD, MS, Medical Epidemiologist, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

AHCA Staff Leadership Representative (Co-Chair):

Dr. David Gifford, MD, MPH, Chief Medical Officer, American Health Care Association

AHCA Quality Cabinet Member Representative:

Vicky Nordby, Marquis Companies

Facility members to ensure broad-based constituency representation and other adequate LTC experience:

Lisa Chubb, Chief Clinical Officer, Brickyard Healthcare
Tom Rollins, Chief Clinical Officer, Prestige Care Inc.
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Academic Researcher

Morgan Katz, MD, MHS, Director of Antimicrobial Stewardship, John Hopkins University School of Medicine

2024-2025 Research Review Committee

Representative providers that are from current enrolled organizations in the cooperative that represents the diversity of provider types:

Debbie Meade, CEO, Health Management
Phil Fogg, President, Marquis Companies
Matthew Wayne, Chief Medical Officer, Communicare Health Services
Leslie Shanlian, CEO/NHA, Ingham County Medical Care Facility
Nick Snyder, Health Information Systems Director, TLC Management

“Research Experience” Provider that has some research experience, who must be from an organization enrolled in the cooperative:

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Technical staff from the LTC Data cooperative Team:

Dr. David Gifford, MD, MPH, Chief Medical Officer, American Health Care Association
Susan Siford, Senior Research Director, Acumen, LLC

Academic Researcher:

Andrew Zullo, MD, Associate Professor of Epidemiology, Brown University

team

Meet The Team

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David Gifford, MD, MPH

Title: Chief Medical Officer, AHCA

David Gifford, MD, MPH, serves as the Chief Medical Officer as well as the Director of the Center for Health Policy Evaluation in Long Term Care at the American Health Care Association. He established the Center and the Quality Department at AHCA. His interests are in improving and measuring quality in LTC as well as how regulatory and payment policies impact quality. He has developed 8 new quality measures for nursing homes that all received NQF endorsement.

He oversees a team of data analysis working with national MDS data, Medicare Claims, and Cost Reports to develop quality measures and conduct policy evaluations. Dr. Gifford also serves on the Board of the Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes campaign and the Baldrige Foundation Board and chairs the Department of Veterans Affairs Geriatric and Gerontology Advisory Committee. He serves on the NQF Measures Applications Partnership (MAP).

He is a former Director of the Rhode Island State Department of Health, where he received the National Governor’s award for Distinguished Service Award for State Officials. He led efforts to expand public reporting of quality for home health and nursing homes and to make the nursing home survey process more person centered. Prior to that he served as Chief Medical Officer for Quality Partners of Rhode Island where he directed CMS’ national nursing home-based quality improvement effort. He also is on the Brown University faculty in the Schools of Medicine and Public Health as well as being a member of Brown’s Center for Quality and Innovation in LTC. He received his medical degree from Case Western Reserve University and conducted his geriatric fellowship at UCLA where he also earned his Master’s in Public Health while a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar.

Stephanie M. Kissam, MPH

Title: Executive Director, Long-Term Care Data Cooperative, AHCA

Stephanie M. Kissam is a health services researcher with over 20 years of leadership in public health program development, research, and management. She started at AHCA in October 2023 after nearly 15 years at RTI International, where she led large national evaluation projects for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation and the Administration for Community Living. Her areas of research include state health policy, health IT implementation, nursing home quality measure development and maintenance, and outcomes of value-based payment models. Earlier in her career she supported leadership at the Rhode Island Department of Health and later at the Office of Health and Human Services in strategic development. In that role, she contributed to the development of the state’s Health Information Exchange and patient-centered medical home initiatives. Additionally, at the Rhode Island Quality Improvement Organization, she developed resources to support nursing homes with CMS’s National Nursing Home Quality Initiative. She received her Master’s in Public Health from the University of Michigan.

Vincent Mor, PhD

Title: Professor of Health Services, Policy & Practice and the Florence Pirce Grant University Health, Brown University School of Public Health

Vincent Mor, PhD, is a professor of health services, policy & practice and Florence Pirce Grant Professor in the Brown University School of Public Health, and has been principal investigator of 40+ NIH-funded grants focusing on use of health services and outcomes of frail and chronically ill people. He has evaluated the impact of programs and policies including Medicare funding of hospice, changes in Medicare nursing home payment, and the introduction of nursing home quality measures. He co-authored the Congressionally-mandated Minimum Data Set (MDS) and was architect of an integrated Medicare claims and clinical assessment data structure used for policy analysis, pharmaco-epidemiology and population outcome measurement. Dr. Mor developed summary measures using MDS data to characterize residents’ physical, cognitive and psycho-social functioning. These data resources are the heart of Dr. Mor’s NIA- funded Program Project Grant, “Changing Long Term Care in America,” which examines the impact of Medicaid and Medicare policies on long-term care. These data are also at the core of a series of large, pragmatic cluster randomized trials of novel nursing home-based interventions led by Dr. Mor.

Elizabeth White, APRN, PhD

Title: Assistant Professor of Health Services, Policy & Practice at Brown University School of Public Health

Assistant Professor of Health Services, Policy, and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health. Her research agenda broadly focuses on understanding how frail medically-complex older adults receive healthcare services, and how factors affecting the nursing and primary care workforces impact quality outcomes in long-term care. During the COVID-19 pandemic she assisted in the construction of large data systems of nursing home electronic health records to examine various aspects of COVID-19 management, treatment, and outcomes among nursing home residents and staff. Dr. White completed an AHRQ T32 postdoctoral fellowship at Brown in the Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research, and an NINR T32 predoctoral fellowship in the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. In addition to her research, Dr. White is a board-certified adult geriatric primary care nurse practitioner and currently practices at the PACE Organization of Rhode Island.

Amy Recker, MPH

Title: Project Director, Brown University School of Public Health

Amy Recker, MPH, is a project director in the Center for Long-Term Care Quality & Innovation at the Brown University School of Public Health. She directs project management for a portfolio of research projects focused in long-term care, including the Long-Term Care Data Cooperative. Her background as an epidemiologist for both the Illinois and Massachusetts Departments of Public Health has been focused on long-term care, emerging healthcare-associated infections, and multi-drug resistant organisms. During her time in Illinois, she worked on managing the emerging Candida auris epidemic spreading through skilled nursing facilities. In Massachusetts, she served as an epidemiologist on the long-term care team during the COVID-19 pandemic. She received her Master’s in Public Health, with a joint concentration in epidemiology and biostatistics, from the University of Southern California.

Lonnita Myles, MBA

Title: Project Director, Research, AHCA/NCAL

Lonnita Myles, a native of the Washington DC Metropolitan area has been at AHCA/NCAL for 9 years. Working with the Quality, Regulatory and Research team throughout her time at AHCA/NCAL, and having also partnered with the Finance and Legal team at AHCA/NCAL on various projects, she has centered her work around intensifying the organization’s quality improvement efforts. In her time at AHCA/NCAL, she has developed expertise in project management, marketing campaigns, and curating educational materials and opportunities.
In her current role as Project Director for the Long-Term Care (LTC) Data Cooperative, Lonnita leads research and management process initiatives that are centered around building quality solutions for quality care. Her experience spans various operations of digital transformation and the introduction of technological opportunities for the long-term care sector.

Susan Siford, PharmD, MBA

Title: Senior Research Director, Acumen, LLC

Susan Siford has over 30 years of experience as a senior manager supervising the day-to-day operations of complex programs serving large populations of end users. Before coming to Acumen, she managed multiple departments within a three-hospital system, which included the adoption of several large-scale IT projects across the hospital system (e.g., Computerized Physician Order Entry). These IT implementations required extensive data evaluation, process restructuring, systems configuration, testing, validation, and comprehensive stakeholder management. Currently, Dr. Siford serves as project director for the National Institute on Aging (NIA) Data LINKAGE Program where she oversees the linkage of NIA-funded studies to CMS data followed by distribution of CMS data to researchers within Acumen’s secure enclave system. She also oversees the Modeling and Analytical Support Services contract with Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), Health Policy Office, where she coordinates the development of research files and linked-data sets for use by government researchers and rapid- turnaround analyses. She also assists in the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) Data Management and Analysis contract with the provision of a secure computing environment for MedPAC analysts to access the universe of Medicare data for use in the evaluation and analysis of the Medicare payment system. In this role, she oversees aspects of data intake from multiple sources into secure data environments, production of linked research files for use by government researchers, and simultaneous internal analyses to inform discussions surrounding the potential impacts of policy reforms. Dr. Siford is a certified Project Management Professional.

Sean MaCurdy, BA

Title: Director of Data Governance, Acumen, LLC

Sean MaCurdy has successfully managed the production and distribution of CMS-linked research files for the NAI Data LINKAGE Program for over a decade. Mr. MaCurdy has thorough knowledge of healthcare data and analytic systems, with considerable experience in securing, organizing, manipulating, analyzing, validating, and linking large datasets. He has extensive experience with data security regulations and requirements, including FISMA, Privacy Act, and HIPAA, and serves as the central point of access for Acumen-held CMS data and related research files. He leads Acumen’s data acquisition efforts with CMS and other data sources, and the coordination of establishing and executing the necessary DUAs. Mr. MaCurdy works directly with the CMS Office of Technology Solutions to perform real-time data validation checks against CMS’s IDR and rapid-turnaround data validation investigations. He has participated in technical expert panels assessing analytic capabilities for various longitudinal data structures, validation investigations, and data access and acquisition processes for sources such as T- MSIS. Mr. MaCurdy has extensive experience in assisting NIA-supported researchers in understanding how to use restricted data and in performing their programming tasks.