Finding out what Georgia’s Department of Community Health knows about the state’s senior care facilities presents a challenge. The state agency that licenses and inspects thousands of facilities across the state is hamstrung by outdated technology and conducts little analysis of its own information.
The AJC wanted to calculate incidents of deaths, abuse and neglect inside assisted living and personal care facilities, and get a sense of how often homes failed to follow rules designed to keep residents safe. To get this information, AJC reporters spent months going through thousands of violations documented in inspection reports to categorize and rate each violation based on its seriousness.
For example, to identify medication errors, we created a database from hits on keywords. We then noted the type of incident, such as whether a resident got the wrong medicine or failed to receive medicine as prescribed.
This process had limitations because the reports are often vague, incomplete and sometimes have conflicting information.
» SEARCHABLE DATABASE: Details on every facility studied by the AJC
