Assessing Quality of Care and Elder Abuse in Nursing Homes via Google Reviews.

Background: It is challenging to assess the quality of care and detect elder abuse in nursing homes, since patients may be incapable of reporting quality issues or abuse themselves, and resources for sending inspectors are limited.

Objective: This study correlates Google reviews of nursing homes with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) inspection results in the Nursing Home Compare (NHC) data set, to quantify the extent to which the reviews reflect the quality of care and the presence of elder abuse.

Methods: A total of 16,160 reviews were collected, spanning 7,170 nursing homes.