Visibility and Findability of the Nursing Home Compare Website

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-9-2014

Publication Title

Social Work in Public Health

Volume

30

Issue

2

First page number:

144

Last page number:

56

Abstract

Nursing Home Compare (NHC) is a federal government website providing information for selecting a nursing home. However, not many consumers were aware of or can locate the site. This study analyzed 50 official state and District of Columbia websites from September through December 2013. Using Google “inlink:” operator, this study evaluated the visibility and findability of NHC links in each state-level website. The results show that a link to NHC is available in all states except for Connecticut, Florida, and Michigan. Although it took only 4.7 clicks on average to the page with a NHC link, consumers may still have difficulty to find NHC from a state website. This article provides a snapshot of the visibility and findability of NHC and indicates a need for further investigation of promising website dissemination strategies not yet adequately evaluated.

Keywords

Decision making; Internet; World Wide Web; consumer health information

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