If a database doesn’t meet your search needs, do it yourself

Just because the online data is available elsewhere doesn’t mean you can’t make it better. ProPublica proved that this week with the launch of an interactive tool for searching nursing home inspection reports.

Lena Groeger

“We wanted to give people an interface to explore these incredibly detailed nursing home inspection reports, to give them a view into the real narratives of what goes on in nursing homes,” says Lena Groeger, who created the tool with Charles Ornstein.

Charles says the online reports posted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services limited searches to nursing home names and required multiple clicks to get to the information. So ProPublica set out to create a tool that gives users multiple ways to search the data including location or keywords such as bedsores and medication errors.

“If you see a dataset that can’t be searched in a way you want, you can add value by doing it yourself,” Charles says. “It’s pretty amazing how quickly you can find things of interest when you have an interface that’s inviting. A user’s imagination is the limit.”

Charles Ornstein

Lena, the news application developer, says the biggest challenge was organizing the data to allow for easier searching. Also, she says the data changed several times as CMS updated the information during the five-week project.

Both Charles and Lena say collaboration was a big part of the project’s success.

“It highlights how important it is not just to have the technical means to build an app or tool, but also the deep journalistic knowledge to pull out details and real-life examples that really bring that data to life,” Lena says.