WASHINGTON – Looking for a good nursing home, and hoping to avoid facilities with a history of trouble? A new feature on the Nursing Home Compare Web site run by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is designed to make the search for such facilities simpler.
Along with previously available quality information, the site now lists whether a home is or has been on CMS’ special focus facility list, which gives heightened scrutiny to homes with a history of poor performance or repeated violations of state and federal health and safety rules.
In a news release issued last Thursday, CMS Acting Administrator Kerry Weems said the new data would give Medicare beneficiaries “a more complete picture of a nursing home’s history of providing quality care.”
CMS said it started identifying “special focus” facilities because some nursing homes “were consistently providing poor quality of care, yet were periodically instituting enough improvement that they would pass one survey only to fail the next.”
Last November, the agency began publishing a list of Medicare and Medicaid participating nursing homes that had a history of serious quality-of-care problems and had failed to show significant improvement. In February, the list was updated and expanded to include whether a facility was new to the list, was improving, had recently come off the list, or had stopped participating in Medicare and Medicaid.
As of April, there are 134 “special focus” facilities, out of about 16,000 active nursing homes. Only one of the 86 Rhode Island facilities currently listed on Nursing Home Compare is in the program, Haven Health Center Of Pawtucket, at 70 Gill Ave., which CMS says has been on the list for three months. (Other Haven Health facilities in Coventry, Greenville and Warren are not on the “special focus” list.)
No Connecticut facilities are on the list, and only one in Massachusetts is, Redstone Rehabilitation And Nursing Center, in East Longmeadow.
While a separate Web site on the “special focus” program provides more information, however, the Nursing Home Compare site at this point only flags the problem facilities with a small footnote.
Once a facility is put in the program, the state survey agency – the R.I. Department of Health, in this case – conducts twice the number of standard surveys and will apply progressive enforcement until the nursing home either significantly improves and leaves the program; is granted additional time due to promising developments; or is terminated from Medicare and/or Medicaid. CMS and the state can more quickly terminate a facility that is placing residents in immediate jeopardy.
CMS said it 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.
The agency last week also issued a multi-year plan for improving nursing home quality, which includes:
• An increasing array of materials to educate and help consumers, to be posted at www.medicare.gov.
• Improvements to the annual nursing home survey process.
• Enhanced quality improvement efforts, with a special focus on the work of quality improvement organizations, to prevent bed sores, reduce the use of physical restraints, and provide more personalized care for residents.
• Partnerships through the quality improvement organizations, as part of a campaign called “Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes.”
A copy of the full 2008 nursing home action plan is posted at www.cms.hhs.gov.
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