The Nursing Home Compare website and Five-Star Quality Rating System were created to help consumers, their families, and caregivers compare nursing homes and identify areas of possible inquiry when considering and comparing nursing home care providers. Highly anticipated changes to the federal Five-Star Quality Rating System for nursing homes are supposed to commence today, ending a freeze on survey results. Providers will learn whether they have gained or lost stars, or, as is expected for about half of facilities, remained the same.
Nursing Home Compare has a quality rating system that gives each nursing home a rating between 1 and 5 stars. Nursing homes with 5 stars are considered to have above average quality and nursing homes with 1 star are considered to have quality below average. There is one Overall 5-star rating for each nursing home, and a separate rating for each of the following 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 encourage quality improvement at nursing homes across the country.
The set of changes also will bring the addition of new measures tied to long-stay hospitalizations and emergency room transfers, along with removing some “duplicative and less meaningful” metrics. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has said it wanted separate quality ratings for short-stay and long-stay residents, and it has revised rating thresholds to better pinpoint quality variations among SNFs for consumers.
