Users of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Nursing Home Compare Web site will now be able to see whether a particular nursing home has recently drawn heightened government scrutiny.
In addition to information about staff-to-resident ratios, fire safety deficiencies and quality measures, the entry for each facility will now show whether the nursing home is or has been on CMS’ Special Focus Facility (SFF) list — a designation for poor-performing facilities.
“Today’s 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 in a press release issued April 24.
CMS began the SFF program in response to recurring quality violations at a number of facilities, the agency said. Those violations were often difficult to address because homes would improve conditions long enough to pass an inspection, and then care would quickly deteriorate again. As part of the initiative, CMS has published lists of nursing homes with serious violations and provided information about each site’s level of subsequent improvement.
Once a nursing home is added to the SFF list, it undergoes twice as many surveys, CMS officials said. That additional oversight continues until the home improves significantly and is taken off the list, given additional time to comply because of a demonstrated effort or terminated from the program.
“As of April 2008, there are 134 SFFs out of about 16,000 active nursing homes,” the CMS release states. “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.”
Making SFF designations available to consumers is one component of an extensive strategy to curtail abuse and improve quality of care in nursing home settings, CMS officials said. As part of the 2008 Action Plan for Further Improvement of Nursing Home Quality, officials said their plans include increasing consumer awareness with easy-to-understand, Web-based information; creating more effective nursing home surveys; and collaborating with quality improvement organizations and state survey agencies.
Government Health IT presents Rick Friedman, director of the division of state systems for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in this recent eSeminar regarding how the federal Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services is partnering with state Medicaid and health and human services officials to bring Medicaid into the digital age. Paul McCloskey, Government Health IT editor, moderates.
