DOI: 10.3886/icpsr07853.v1
title: Geriatric Home Care Utilization: San Francisco, 1968-1975
title: Version 1

description: This data collection reported on geriatric clients served by San Francisco Home Health Services, Inc. (SFHHS) between 1968 and 1975. The study was designed to document and analyze the natural history of home care service use from entry to exit, noting what types of users were in a home care agency's program and how intensively services were utilized. The study also identified outcome categories useful for response to public policy questions on the effectiveness of various service types in meeting geriatric needs. Also examined was the relationship of home care use to nursing home entry, and to the need for other services. In Part 1, data for 2,435 clients were gathered from case records at SFHHS. Variables used in the analysis include entry characteristics (e.g, age, sex, condition, living arrangement, and contextual variables such as referral source, prior source of care, and payment type), duration, intensity, and type of service utilization, as well as discharge or exit status. Some of these are calculated variables derived from each case's accumulated monthly service records (found in their raw form in Part 2). Part 2 contains 35,729 client monthly service records, which are distributed as raw data as received from SFHHS. Variables include billing date, pay plan, and frequency and intensity of assistance.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Standardized missing values.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS0: Study-Level Files 
 DS1: Main File: Service Use from Entry to Exit 
 DS2: Raw Data: History File
description: Only the hardcopy codebook contains documentation for Part 2.
The longitudinal data from which this study is comprised were compiled retrospectively by San Francisco Home Health Services, Inc.(SFHHS) under federal contract (HEW-100-77-0065) and a grant from the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (Grant 003A-7601) for all cases served by SFHHS from the mid-1957 origin of the agency through December 1975. They were incorporated into coded files that document entry, service history, and discharge experience. The SFHHS machine-readable data were organized into four files: Header, Interrupt, Functional Assessment, and History. Only the Header and History records were considered complete enough for use in the present study. Variables for analyzing personal and contextual influences on service utilization such as birthdate, pay plan, public assistance, diagnosis, referral source, sex, marital status, and closing codes were developed from the original SFHHS Header file. Information on utilization, such as sums of home health aid, nurse, and therapist visits was drawn from the original SFHHS History file. The original SFHHS History records are included as Part 2 of this collection, and they are represented in Part 1 through calculated variables derived from each case's accumulated monthly service records.
description: All clients at the San Francisco Home Health Services, Inc. who were 65 or older at entry, not Kaiser Plan cases, and who began service between January 1968 and December 1974.
description: The sample is the same as as the universe, with client ethnicity broadly representative of San Francisco's population between 1968-1974: close to one-third native-born Caucasian, one quarter each foreign-born Caucasian and Asian, and about one-tenth each Black and Latino.