Agency releases quality for comparison of SNFs

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is releasing performance data on skilled nursing facilities.

The information is intended to help patients, families, clinicians and others find and compare facilities that are certified by Medicare and Medicaid.

The federal Nursing Home Compare website already holds quality of resident care and staffing information for more than 15,000 nursing homes.

Now, CMS is adding quality reporting data that can help compare skilled nursing providers by their performance on certain indicators of quality, such as the percentage of a SNF’s residents that develop pressure ulcers or how many residents fall and are injured.



Other quality measures to be added include the percentage of residents whose activities of daily living and thinking skills were assessed with related goals included in the treatment plan, and the percentage of patients who have a major injury from a fall.

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Additional data measured by CMS includes the rate of successful returns home or community from a SNF and the rate at which patients returned to home and remained alive without unplanned hospitalizations in the month after discharge from a SNF.

CMS further compares Medicare spending per beneficiary, such as whether Medicare spends more or less for an episode of care in a specific SNF, compared to how much Medicare spends on the same episode of care across all SNFs.

CMS was expecting to publish a sixth quality measure covering potentially preventable 30-day post-discharge readmissions but decided to conduct more testing to ensure the measure is sufficiently evaluated. More information for skilled nursing facilities ¬is available here.