Question

Explain purpose of the CMS Nursing Home Compare Website.

Answer 1

the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced updates coming next month to Nursing Home Compare and the Five-Star Quality Rating Systemto strengthen this tool for consumers to compare quality between nursing homes. The April 2019 updates to Nursing Home Compare are part of a broad range of updates that have been under development for the last several years. The Nursing Home Compare website and Five-Star Quality Rating Systemwere created to help consumers, their families, and caregivers compare nursing homes and identify areas they may want to ask about when looking at nursing home care. The updates further advance CMS’s goals to improve the accuracy and value of the information found on the site and promote quality improvement in nursing home care with the result of better health outcomes for residents.

“CMS is committed to safeguarding the health and safety of nursing home residents by ensuring they are receiving the highest quality of care possible,” said CMS Administrator Seema Verma. “Our updates to Nursing Home Compare reflect more transparent and meaningful information about the quality of care that each nursing home is giving its residents. Our goal is to drive quality improvements across the industry and empower consumers to make decisions, with more confidence, for their loved ones.”

three factors:

• Health Inspections: Inspections include the findings on compliance to Medicare and Medicaid health and safety requirements from onsite surveys conducted by state survey agencies at nursing homes.
• Staffing Levels: The staffing levels are the numbers of nurses available to care for patients in a nursing home at any given time.
• Quality Measures: The quality of resident care measures are based on resident assessment and Medicare claims data.

CMS has periodically made improvements to the website and ratings system. Each update has been part of CMS’s ongoing effort to increase the accuracy of information available to consumers and to drive quality improvement at nursing homes across the country.

In 2012, CMS enhanced the design and usability of Nursing Home Compare while incorporating a considerable amount of new information. In 2015, several improvements, including measures on the use of antipsychotic drugs in the ratings’ calculation and adjustments to the quality measures and staffing ratings’ methodology created additional incentives for increasing the quality of care at nursing homes. And, most recently, in 2018, CMS replaced the self-reported staffing data with data collected electronically through the Payroll-Based Journal (PBJ) system, which provides an unprecedented insight into the staffing of nursing homes. CMS also announced future plans to improve the website and ratings system, such as adding a measure of hospitalizations among long-stay residents.