Abt Associates and our partners are assisting HCFA in developing indicators to measure the quality of care and services provided in long term and post-acute care institutional settings.  Phases of this project include review and evaluation of all indicators developed to date, development of new quality indicators, and validation of new indicators via primary data collection in nursing homes and post-acute care settings.  The ultimate goal of the project is to provide HCFA with a set of indicators relevant to assessing quality and informing consumers in post-acute and other populations, and benchmarking information for how institutional providers should be expected to perform against those indicators.  Confidence in an indicator-based quality monitoring system will only be achieved if the data upon which the indicator system is based are reliable and accurate.  We are also working toward ensuring the accuracy of the Minimum Data Set, which involves the design, implementation, and testing of off-site and on-site protocols for verifying MDS data.  These data will be analyzed using statistical methods in order to determine patterns of MDS data errors or aberrancies.  We will then collect resident information and other data during site visits to sampled nursing homes to test various methods of data verification (e.g., medical record review).  The end products will include software applications for identifying aberrant MDS data, software applications for identifying nursing homes which submit aberrant MDS data, and primary data collection protocols for verifying the accuracy of MDS data.