A Smarter Way to Screen Senior/Disability Care Providers
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Wondering if the senior care provider you’re considering has a history of abuse, neglect or exploitation? To begin your search, simply click on the orange search button below.
About Elder Care IQ
Elder Care IQ takes the mystery out of screening senior and disability care providers for quality and safety issues. Our easy-to-use interactive map is populated with an icon for each licensed nursing home, assisted living, home care, boarding care, hospice and hospital provider across Minnesota.
A simple click on any icon will bring up the provider name/location and indicate if there are investigations of abuse, neglect, or exploitation. You’ll also be able access information regarding fines and regular inspections reports that monitor each provider’s compliance with state protection law.
Finding the perfect place will still pose challenges — but this tool will help you assess providers with poor histories for providing quality and safe care.
Elder Care IQ Is an Important Decision-Making Tool
Use this as one of your decision-making tools to screen MN nursing homes, assisted living facilities, home care or home health agencies. It provides the investigation reports from the MN Department of Health for complaints of abuse, neglect and exploitation of the residents or clients.
The benefits of IQ are:
- Free to all users.
- Created by a nonprofit, with no commercial interest.
- All data comes from state governmental investigation, survey reports and fine data.
- It includes all licensed nursing homes, assisted living, home health care, boarding care, hospice and hospital providers in MN.
- There is no attempt to manage or interpret the data. An AI generated summary is available if you want it.
- Funding comes only from donations and grants. None have any influence on any aspect of this tool.
There are no interpretations of the data - it reflects exactly what the MDH investigators and surveyors reported. You decide how appropriate a provider is for your needs.
These investigation reports are very helpful in identifying the quality-of-care track record for every licensed nursing home, assisted living, home care or home health agency in the state.
It is important to note that there are occasional errors in MDH data — but we have no control over those errors. Additionally, you may not find a certain place that you are looking for because MDH issues these investigation reports under the licensee name, which is sometimes different than the name for the residence.
The Minnesota Coalition on Government Information (MNCOGI) awarded Elder Voice Family Advocates the 2023 Finnegan Freedom Information Award for the creation of the ElderCareIQ.Org website. The website assists seniors and their families with monitoring and evaluating care facility quality, by working with the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) to create an online database of care facility information. Users of the “Elder Care IQ” database can search elder care facilities by zip code, and then examine MDH complaint data, state inspection survey forms, and related correspondence. The project is a positive example of how the Data Practices Act can be utilized to provide critical information to the public. MNCOGI also wishes to highlight the role that MDH played in helping to transfer its data to EVA for the Elder Care IQ project.
Approximately, only 15% of the complaints are investigated (5% are investigated on-site). This means that providers who have no investigations are not necessarily free of quality care issues.
