Consumers
will be able to get more accurate ratings of nursing homes under a
revised system that the federal government put into effect on Friday.
The
change is a step toward ensuring that a five-star rating really means
that the home provides exemplary service and is not simply inflating its
scores by lying about its performance. Perhaps, not surprisingly, the
overall ratings of nearly a third of the nation’s nursing homes dropped
under the new rules.
The
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services uses three main criteria —
staffing levels, performance on certain quality measures, and annual
inspections by state and federal inspectors — to rate homes from one to
five stars over all and on each of the three categories separately. The
results are posted on its Nursing Home Compare website. The old system
relied heavily on self-reporting by the nursing homes of their
staff-to-patient ratios and their quality measures. As The Times reported in August, even homes with a history of serious problems received high ratings based on their unverified self-evaluations.
The
rule changes were aimed primarily at the recalibrating the
quality-of-care measures, such as the percentage of patients with new or
worsened pressure sores and the percentage of patients who report
severe or moderate pain. The system still relies on self-evaluations of
quality, but it raises the bar on an array of these measures, thus
making it harder to get top ratings.
It
also added new measures on the use of anti-psychotic drugs, reflecting
concerns that some homes overmedicate patients to make them easier to
manage. And it adjusts mathematical steps used to calculate staffing
ratios. Before the change, about 80 percent of the nation’s nursing
homes received a four- or five-star rating on their quality measures;
afterward, about 49 percent did. The number receiving only one star for
quality rose to 13 percent after the recalibration, from 8.5 percent.
Two-thirds of the homes dropped stars from previous ratings.
Although
the nursing homes will still be evaluating their own quality, the
federal government will have state agencies conduct on-site surveys
starting this year to check on the accuracy of quality statistics at a
sample of homes across the nation. It is imperative that those surveys
be as rigorous as possible to help determine if even stronger measures
are needed.
Full Article & Source:
Is That Really a Five-Star Nursing Home?
1 comment:
They used to just take the facility's word for it?
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