For nursing home residents and their families, making a decision about what facility to choose can be a daunting and frustrating process. How do you know whether the nursing home you are considering for your loved one provides quality care? One resource is the federal government website which provides quality measures for every nursing home in the U.S. For more than ten years, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has been posting information on facility staffing measures on the Medicare.gov website under Care Compare. The information supplied regarding nursing home quality measures has been of questionable quality. However, over the last several years, CMS has gradually been making improvements to the information reported.
Most recently, on June 28, 2023, CMS began posting more detailed nursing home ownership information on the federal website, Care Compare, and its data website, data.cms.gov.
Care Compare will publish “affiliated entity names” (“Affiliated entities are groups of nursing homes sharing at least one individual or organizational owner, officer, or entity with operational/managerial control”) and “affiliated entity identification numbers (IDs) for each facility.” For the first time, consumers will see how nursing homes in a chain or under common ownership or control perform in various quality measures, including the Care Compare Five-Star rating system, staffing levels, regulatory violations, and many other performance measures.
According to CMS, as part of its commitment to transparency, “their goal is to provide consumers with as much information about nursing homes as possible to support their healthcare decisions. Allowing consumers to see information about a nursing home’s affiliated entities directly on Nursing Home Care Compare supports our initiative to promote data transparency and dissemination and allows consumers and their caregivers to make more informed decisions about their care.”
Publishing aggregate performance data for affiliated entities on data.cms.gov promotes safety and quality of care by increasing the transparency of nursing home safety and quality data among nursing homes with shared ownership and operatorship structures. The goal is also to increase accountability for owners and operators of multiple nursing homes.
It has been a fruitless endeavor to determine who actually owns a nursing home. CMS’s new affiliation data is a critical and important step in ensuring increased transparency in nursing home ownership.
On July 27, 2023, at 1 p.m. ET, Consumer Voice will hold a webinar to demonstrate how to use this newly available information.
You can also review more information regarding the updates here.
