A couple of weeks ago we looked at one Florida nursing home  to see what available government data could tell us about the quality of care. Today we'll take a look at what the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) data can tell us about nursing homes throughout the nation as a whole.

A few well-respected researchers (such as Charlene Harrington and her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco) have tackled these questions in depth, but reporters can still glean useful nuggets through their own quick and dirty analysis.

We used the Nursing Home Compare data ...