http://nhc.hsi.gatech.edu/

As you may know, choosing a nursing home in the United States is an emotion-laden, difficult decision that can be often made under enormous stress and time pressure. To make matters worse, there are so many things to consider in choosing a good one among so many nursing homes. I noticed that many people were misguided and ended up choosing a bad one for their loved ones even though there is so much information on the Internet these days. Thus, we have developed a tool to help people crunch numbers and information, so that they can make a better decision. We tried to use some cutting-edge interactive technologies, called information visualization and make the tool easy to use. However, we have focused too much on new technologies, so we might fail to see the perspectives of the real decision makers. Thus, we need your help. Please let us have your opinions and insights, so that we can make this tool better. In order to collect your opinions more effectively, we made the following separate website: http://nhc.hsi.gatech.edu/ This website has a couple of surveys to collect your experiences and stories about how to choose the best nursing home. It also has a small experiment (4 conditions) that allows you to experience the tool and let us have your feedback on how it works for you. Anybody who has previous experience in choosing a nursing home, or anticipates having a need to do so in the future is welcomed. It will take about 30 minutes to complete the surveys and experiment. Further more, if you complete the surveys and experiment, we would like to provide you with a user account that allows you to use the current version of our tool, which has the following complete features. 1) An interactive nursing home locators: you can find nursing homes in your neighborhoods with a zip code or street address. 2) Quality information of about 16,000 nursing homes: the website provides the quality information of real nursing homes in the US. 3) The complete version of the visual tool: you can utilize the complete version of the visual tool you just experienced. It would provide you with actual helps to make a better and informed decision, and you could have observe the evolution of the website nurtured by your feedback and input. Please also feel free to forward this email to someone who may be interested in this study as well. If you have any other questions, please email me. Thank you very much once again for your time and consideration!!!

Web Survey

Georgia Institute of Technology

Ji Soo Yi

May 21st 2008 - July 21st 2008