Predicting Nursing Home Financial Distress Using the Altman Z-Score

This article uses a modified Altman Z-score to predict financial distress within the nursing home industry. The modified Altman Z-score model uses multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) to examine multiple financial ratios simultaneously to assess a firm’s financial distress. This study utilized data...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Justin Lord PhD, Amy Landry PhD, Grant T. Savage PhD, Robert Weech-Maldonado PhD
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SAGE Publishing 2020-07-01
Series:Inquiry: The Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision, and Financing
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1177/0046958020934946
Description
Summary:This article uses a modified Altman Z-score to predict financial distress within the nursing home industry. The modified Altman Z-score model uses multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) to examine multiple financial ratios simultaneously to assess a firm’s financial distress. This study utilized data from Medicare Cost Reports, LTCFocus, and the Area Resource File. Our sample consisted of 167 268 nursing home-year observations, or an average of 10 454 facilities per year, in the United States from 2000 through 2015. The independent financial variables, liquidity, profitability, efficiency, and net worth were entered stepwise into the MDA model. All of the financial variables, with the exception of net worth, significantly contributed to the discriminating power of the model. K-means clustering was used to classify the latent variable into 3 categorical groups: distressed, risk-of-financial distress, and healthy. These findings will provide policy makers and practitioners another tool to identify nursing homes that are at risk of financial distress.
ISSN:0046-9580
1945-7243