Connecting policy to licensed assisted living communities, introducing health services regulatory analysis.

We identified significant, previously undocumented, within-state policy variation for assisted living licensed settings between 2007 and 2018. Using the regulatory classification instead of the state as the unit of analysis revealed that many policy adoptions were limited to dementia-designated settings. This suggests that people living with dementia in general assisted living are not afforded the same protections. We call our approach health services regulatory analysis and argue that it has the potential to identify gaps in existing policies, an important endeavor for health services research in assisted living and other care settings.