Quality Measures Added to Nursing Home Compare Website
Nursing Home Compare is a website included in www.medicare.gov which allows consumers to compare quality of care and staffing information for more than 15,000 Medicare- and Medicaid-participating nursing homes.
Recently, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) added six new quality measures to the Nursing Home Compare website in an effort to increase the quality of information available to consumers. According to Nursing Home Compare, “The nursing homes that are shown on Nursing Home Compare provide a level of care called “skilled” care. Skilled care is care given when an individual needs skilled nursing or rehabilitation staff to manage, observe, or evaluate your care.”
Nursing Home Compare includes information on the following:
- 5-star quality ratings of overall and individual star performance on health inspections, quality measures, and hours of care provided per resident by staff performing nursing care tasks;
- Health and fire-safety inspections with detailed and summary information about deficiencies found during the 3 most recent comprehensive inspections (conducted annually) and the last 3 years of complaint investigations;
- Nursing home staffing information about the number of registered nurses, licensed practical or vocational nurses, physical therapists and nursing assistants in each nursing home;
- A set of quality measures that describe the quality of care in nursing homes; and
- Penalties against a nursing home.
In addition, Nursing Home Compare includes a “Guide to Choosing a Nursing Home” and a “Nursing Home Checklist” for consumers to use when visiting and choosing a nursing home.
In April 2016, CMS began posting data for new quality measures on Nursing Home Compare which are primarily based on Medicare claims data.
The new quality measures include the percentage of:
- Short-stay residents who were successfully discharged to the community;
- Short-stay residents who have had an outpatient emergency department visit;
- Short-stay residents who were re-hospitalized after a nursing home admission;
- Short-stay residents who made improvements in function;
- Long-stay residents whose ability to move independently worsened; and
- Long-stay residents who received an anti-anxiety or hypnotic medication.
Beginning in July 2016, five of the measures outlined above will be used in the calculation of the Five-Star Quality Rating. The anti-anxiety/hypnotic medication measure will not be used in the Five-Star Rating due to concerns about its specificity and appropriate thresholds for star ratings. The quality measures are one of three parts which CMS utilizes to create the overall Five-Star rating for nursing homes. Addition of these new measures as part of the Five-Star Quality Ratings has several key benefits including, but not limited to, the following:
- Increasing the number of short-stay measures;
- Covering important domains not covered by other measures; and
- Claims-based measures may be more accurate than MDS-based measures.
Quality measure data are updated on Nursing Home Compare on a quarterly basis simultaneously with the nursing home quality measure rating.
As explained on the Medicare website, the purpose of Nursing Home Compare and the addition of these new quality measures is to enable Americans with quality of care information to aid in making more informed decisions about their health care, and to encourage providers and clinicians to improve the quality of health care.
The Nursing Home Compare website can be accessed here:
https://www.medicare.gov/nursinghomecompare/search.html
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