Glossary

Activities of Daily Living (ADLs)

Also known as: ADLs, ADLs

The basic self-care tasks -- bathing, dressing, toileting, transferring, continence, and eating -- used clinically and contractually to assess a resident's care needs and determine the appropriate level of care and service charge.

ADL counts and scoring are the mechanical basis for most assisted living rate structures: many operators use a tiered or points-based pricing model in which the resident's service fee rises with the number of ADLs requiring assistance, making the ADL assessment both a clinical and a revenue-generating event repeated periodically (often quarterly or upon any condition change) throughout a resident's stay. ADL assessment is also the basis on which a facility determines whether a prospective or current resident exceeds its licensed scope of care -- for example, requiring two-person transfer assistance may exceed what a given AL license permits, forcing a transition to skilled nursing regardless of the family's preference.