Nursing Home Compare Website Now Shows if Homes Are
on the Bad List
CMS releases multi-year plan for improved nursing
home quality
May 2, 2008 - The worst performing nursing homes
were first listed on the "Nursing Home Compare" Website last November by
the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS). Last week the
agency announced the information has been expanded to help Medicaid
(Medicare does not pay for typical long-term care) beneficiaries and
families find top quality long-term care services. The site will now
list whether a home is or has been on CMS’ special focus facility (SFF)
list.
Wants to help people choose nursing homes for long-term care
Nov. 29, 2007 – Ouch! The Centers for Medicare &
Medicaid Services (CMS) today released the first ranking of the nation’s
poor-performing nursing homes, which it identifies as “Special Focus
Facilities.” CMS says the purpose is to help people choose nursing homes
for long-term care.
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The agency’s SFF initiative gives heightened
scrutiny to nursing homes that have a history of poor performance or
repeated violations of state and federal health and safety rules.
The expansion of information on Nursing Home
Compare “will give beneficiaries a more complete picture of a nursing
home’s history of providing quality care,” CMS Acting Administrator
Kerry Weems said.
The SFF initiative was created because a number of
facilities were consistently providing poor quality of care, yet were
periodically instituting enough improvement that they would pass one
survey only to fail the next (for many of the same problems as before).
Such facilities with a “yo-yo” compliance history rarely addressed
underlying systemic problems that were giving rise to repeated cycles of
serious deficiencies.
In November 2007, the agency began publishing a
list of Medicare and Medicaid participating nursing homes that have a
history of serious quality of care problems and had failed to show
significant improvement. In February 2008, CMS took the next step and
published an updated, expanded list of nursing homes in the SFF
initiative and included the category they fell within such as new
additions, not improved, improving, recently graduated or no longer in
the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
As of April 2008, there are 134 SFFs, out of about
16,000 active nursing homes. CMS works closely with states to select
participants and as homes improve their quality of care and “graduate”
from the program, or fail to improve and are terminated from Medicare
and Medicaid, new homes are added to the list. This movement of homes
off the list allows more facilities with problems to be added as the
program continues.
Once a facility is selected as an SFF, the state
survey agency conducts twice the number of standard surveys and will
apply progressive enforcement until the nursing home either (a)
significantly improves and graduates from the SFF initiative, (b) is
granted additional time due to promising developments, or (c) is
terminated from Medicare and/or Medicaid. CMS and the state can more
quickly terminate a facility that is placing residents in immediate
jeopardy.
Nursing homes that have the SFF designation,
including information about that designation, will now be noted on
Nursing Home Compare, which can be accessed at
www.medicare.gov. The site helps families find nursing homes in
their area. Information about the homes includes performance scores on
quality measures, staffing information and a three-year history of the
home’s health, safety and fire inspection reports. The Web site will be
updated with new information quarterly.
This action is the "next step in our commitment to
bring transparency and accountability to the process families must go
through to find the care that is best for them and their family member,”
Weems said.
Further Actions Planned
The publication of the SFF list was the first major
step in CMS’ latest efforts to improve nursing home care. A
comprehensive, multi-year look at future actions the agency will take
was also released today.
The “2008 Action Plan for Further Improvement of
Nursing Home Quality” consists of several inter-related and coordinated
approaches:
● Consumer Awareness and Assistance: to include
an increasing array of information about long-term care that will be
written in an easy-to-understand format and available to the public at
www.medicare.gov. Already posted there is the “Guide to Nursing
Homes” and the “Compare” data. These tools can be used by Medicare
beneficiaries and their family members to better understand the quality
and value of Medicare’s nursing home benefit.
● Survey, Standards and Enforcement Improvement:
several initiatives are being developed to improve the effectiveness
of the annual nursing home surveys as well as those prompted by consumer
complaints. The agency also plans to work in partnership with states to
improve current enforcement efforts.
● Quality Improvement: The agency is focusing on
several key areas to improve health care quality in nursing homes
including a special focus from the quality improvement organization (QIO)
program on prevention of bed sores, reduction in the use of physical
restraints and greater emphasis on developing individualized care plans
to improve a resident’s quality of life.
● Quality Through Partnerships: Through its
QIOs, CMS has coordinated an unprecedented, collaborative campaign,
“Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes” designed to improve
both the delivery and measurement of quality care. Through its work
with QIOs, state survey agencies, and the nursing home industry and
consumers, CMS is well on track to achieve these goals.
