Today OnlyBoth launches as a public service what is likely the largest benchmarking analysis ever conducted, as measured in terms of readable language output.

The U.S. has about 1.4 million residents of nursing homes and 15,665 Medicare or Medicaid certified nursing homes. The federal government, through its regulatory powers and reimbursement function, collects performance data on all of these nursing homes, which cry out for comparison in order to understand how each is doing and where each falls short, compared to all peers or their subsets, without bias.

We downloaded data from the federal Nursing Home Compare website and spent a couple of days consolidating the information and configuring our Benchmarking Engine, then pushed a button (figuratively!) and waited just a day and a half. The output consists of 642,192 insights, totaling more than two Encyclopaedia Britannicas in terms of English words contained in grammatical, to-the-point sentences and paragraphs. Enter a nursing home and browse the insights at http://nursing.onlyboth.com.

What did the benchmarking engine find?  At one extreme, the engine found the most things to say about Signature Healthcare at Saint Francis in Memphis, TN although most of these were not complimentary. There is clearly room for improvement there.

We often say that a massive analysis, as only an automated benchmarking engine can do, can find specific areas where even the best can improve. We discussed such a case – Stanford University Hospital – while launching our earlier hospitals benchmarking engine.

Let’s revisit sunny California. The US News & World Report lists Edgemoor Hospital in Santee, CA as the top nursing home in California, due to its top five-star rating in all the major categories. Could even Edgemoor improve? The engine reveals several areas for improvement, this one for example:

Edgemoor Hospital in Santee, CA has the most facility-reported incidents (9) of all the 200 nursing homes that have the top rating in each of overall, health inspection, quality measures, staffing, and registered-nurse staffing (5 total). Those 9 represent 18.8% of the total across the 200 nursing homes, whose average is 0.2.

Now let’s consider Bridgepoint Sub-Acute and Rehab Capitol Hill in Washington, DC which is the nursing home nearest Capitol Hill, where Congress meets. This facility does especially well in bladder and bowel control among low-risk, long-stay residents, as compared to other for-profit facilities that locate within a hospital. The engine found six specific areas for keen improvement, the first of which is this:

Bridgepoint Sub-Acute and Rehab Capitol Hill in Washington, DC has the 3rd-most high-risk long-stay residents with pressure ulcers (24.8%) among the 1,982 Mid-Atlantic nursing homes. That 24.8% compares to an average of 6.4% across the 1,982 nursing homes.

Another noteworthy insight it that the facility has “the most severe deficiencies on the health survey (5) of the 718 nursing homes that have the top rating in each of quality measures, staffing, and registered-nurse staffing.”

This application is launched as a public service as well as a technology showcase, benchmarking well over triple the number of entities that were benchmarked in our previous largest application, to 4,803 hospitals. The relevance to business is this:  the advent of cloud services, internet of things, and other means for collecting customer performance data will enable the automated benchmarking of business processes, generating tremendous economic value by benchmarking 10,000 entities with the same amount of work as benchmarking 10 entities.

Our goal is universal betterment by providing persuasive, motivating insights that pinpoint what is going well and where improvement is sorely needed and is achievable. Benchmarking Engines will do for business benchmarking what Search Engines did for information seeking, assigning to computers what they do better – massive comparisons – and to people what they do better – evaluating and following up, as appropriate – on benchmarking insights.

Raul Valdes-Perez