This article examines the completeness of the activities of daily living (ADL) items on admission and discharge assessments and the improvement in ADL performance among short-stay residents in the newly adopted Minimum Data Set (MDS) 3.0.

The ADL self-performance items are complete at both admission and discharge, with less than 1% missing for any item. More than 60% of residents improved over the course of their post-acute stay. New short-stay nursing home residents with conditions such as cognitive impairment, delirium, dementia, heart failure, and stroke showed less improvement in ADL performance during their stay.

The discharge assessment data in the MDS 3.0 provide new information to researchers and providers to examine and track ADL performance. Nursing homes can identify and track patients who require more intensive therapies or targeted interventions to achieve functional improvement during their stay. Future research can examine facility-level measures to better understand how ADL improvement varies across facilities.