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 skilled nursing 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, and Exponent, Inc., an interdisciplinary and scientific consulting company, this effort will assemble the largest and most comprehensive health records database from geographically and structurally diverse skilled nursing facilities and residents.

Meet The Team

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.

David Dore, PharmD, PhD

Title: Principal Scientist, Health Sciences, Exponent

Dr. Dore is a pharmacoepidemiologist who specializes in studying the post-marketing safety and effectiveness of medical products as they are used in customary clinical practice. He has over 15 years of experience with regulated post-approval safety studies (PASS) conducted with secondary data sources (e.g., healthcare claims), and he has developed expertise in novel data linkages and supplementary data collection to address biases in these studies. Additionally, Dr. Dore specializes in the development and research applications of large electronic health records (EHR) systems, which typically include a myriad of data types from various health systems. This work has included evaluating and improving the quality of complex EHR data, conducting applied research that involves the use of free-text clinical notes and methods to address missing data, and the design of pragmatic randomized trials. Dr. Dore has been on the faculty at the Brown University School of Public Health since 2008.

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.

Dustin Burns, PhD, Gstat

Title: Senior Managing Scientist, Data Sciences, Exponent

Dr. Dustin Burns assists clients in the commercial and government sectors design and implement AI strategies at scale. Combining his background in laboratory experiments with his expertise in data analytics and cloud computing, Dr. Burns contributes to projects along the entire data science lifecycle, from experimental design and data collection, through data quality assurance, exploratory data analysis and cleaning, to modeling, visualization, and reporting. While applying AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning methods to address traditional business problems in new ways, Dustin strives to incorporate in his work the principles of security, explainability, and reducing algorithmic bias.

In his current role at Exponent, Dustin leads multidisciplinary teams to respond to the world's most impactful problems and to evaluate emerging technologies using AI. Employing expertise in statistics, AI and Machine Learning, programming in multiple languages and cloud computing environments, Dustin’s teams can assist with developing custom algorithms, modernizing analytics programs, advising on regulatory issues , and helping to evaluate intellectual property.

Michael A. Simon, PhD

Title: Managing Scientist, Data Sciences, Exponent

Dr. Michael Simon specializes in the use of complex and heterogeneous datasets to solve challenges in effective healthcare delivery. He has spent over a decade in the healthcare space, with extensive experience working with electronic medical record (EMR) data, payer claims and eligibility data, practice management data, patient experience and socioeconomic data, and other public and private sources of data. Michael has developed, prototyped, implemented, and maintained healthcare-related systems focused on data quality, risk adjustment, physician assignment, care management decision support, and text classification for performance monitoring and incentive determination. Michael has overseen the development of machine-learning based predictive tools performing a range of inferential functions from utilization likelihood to patient benefit optimization. Michael has also overseen the development of life sciences-focused data for research and has written and presented on the importance of implicit bias mitigation in predictive analytics.

Catherine Rogers Murray, MPH

Title: Managing Scientist, Exponent

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Ms. Rogers Murray is an epidemiologist with expertise in managing complex research operations for large-scale, multi-site and regulatory studies. She served as a key member of a national medical product safety surveillance program (the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Sentinel Initiative), overseeing data operations and transparency initiatives to ensure the highest standards of scientific accuracy, rigor, and transparency. She specializes in program management, systems development, communication strategy implementation, and process improvement. The cornerstone of Ms. Rogers Murray’s contribution to public health is her ability to build strong partnerships among diverse stakeholders including regulatory decision-makers, medical product manufacturers, academic researchers, and the general public. She works on the business so others can work in the business.

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.