National Post-acute and Long-term Care Study: Residential Care Community Restricted Dataset

The National Post-acute and Long-term Care Study (NPALS) is a biennial study of major post-acute and long-term care providers and their services users. Seven provider settings are included. NPALS collects survey data on the residential care community and adult day services sectors, and uses administrative data (available from CMS) for home health, nursing home, hospice, inpatient rehabilitation, and long-term care hospital sectors. The goals of the study are to: estimate the supply of paid, regulated post-acute and long-term care services providers; estimate key policy-relevant characteristics and practices of these providers; estimate the number of post-acute and long-term care services users; estimate key policy-relevant characteristics of these users; produce national and state estimates where feasible; compare across provider sectors; and monitor trends over time.