OVERVIEW

This point datalayer contains the location of all licensed nursing homes and rest homes in Massachusetts. The source material for this datalayer was compiled by Phil Mello, Division of Health Care Quality (DHCQ), Massachusetts Department of Public Health. The layer is up-to-date through October, 2005.

According to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Elder Affairs, a nursing home or facility provides 24-hour nursing care, rehabilitative services and activities of daily living to the chronically ill who require supportive nursing care and services. A rest home or residential care facility provides 24-hour supervision and supportive services for individuals who do not routinely need nursing or medical care.

MassGIS stores the data as NURSRESTHOMES_PT.

In ArcMap (v9.1.0.722), address were batch-geocoded against GDT/Dynamap 2000 (release 15.1.0, April 2005). Unmatched addresses were researched using a variety of sources and interactively matched, if a 100% candidate was found. When source materials were used to determine an address, an internal CEH code was used to classify the type of source. A source description was also noted where necessary. For addresses with a street number range (e.g. 9-11 Main Street), the first number of the range was used for matching. For addresses that could not be address matched to GDT/Dynamap, effort was made to locate them by comparison to online mapping engines. If the address could be found, it was on-screen digitized using an internally modified version of the Pick Address developer sample (created 10/5/2001). The Pick Address tool allows users to manually select the locations of addresses that could not be matched by a geocoding service. The tool updates the geometry of the feature class, as well as the X and Y coordinate attributes of the feature.

Point locations were adjusted to better represent actual locations of the facilities. Refinement was done using a variety of resources; 1:5000 color digital ortho-photography, pictometry (courtesy of Local.Live.com), and on-line property assessment databases (Patriotproperties.com, Visionappraisal.com, and official town websites). If no information was available from these sources information from the facilities' websites was used. If the actual building could not be located with some degree of certainty, the point was not moved, and so remains in the location assigned by geocoding. In cases where the facility was a small part of a large building, such as a hospital or medical center, the points may not represent the actual location of the facility, but the points were placed over the building in which the facility was thought to be.

The NURSRESTHOMES_PT attribute table contains the following fields:

Item Name		Description
FACID		Unique number assigned to each licensed entity and maintained through license renewal
FAC_NAME		Facility Name
ADDRESS		Primary address of facility
CITY		City where facility is located. May contain unofficial town names.
ZIP		ZIP Code of facility
TOWN_ID		Town identifier (1-351)
FAC_TYPE		Nursing Home (NH) or Rest Home (RH)
TOTAL_BEDS		Licensed bed quota
MOVED		Indicates whether the point was moved ("Y") or not ("N") to match the MassGIS 2001 color ortho image

MAINTENANCE

MDPH maintains the layer and will provide any updates to MassGIS.

Last Updated 6/2/2006
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