Data: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Updates Nursing Home Five-Star Quality Ratings

From Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS):

Today, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) updated the popular Nursing Home Compare Five-Star Quality Ratings to incorporate new measures, giving families more information at their fingertips to help them make important decisions about care. These new measures look at successful discharges, emergency visits, and re-hospitalizations, and complement other nursing home measures previously announced in April.
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As part of a broader effort at data transparency and consumer choice, CMS hosts a number of sites to help those seeking health care compare various facilities based on star ratings. They include: Hospital Compare, Physician Compare, Medicare Plan Finder, Dialysis Compare, and Home Health Compare. These star rating programs are part of the Administration’s Open Data Initiative which aims to make government data freely available and useful while ensuring privacy, confidentiality, and security.

More From CMS:

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently added six new quality measures to the Nursing Home Compare website as part of an initiative to broaden the amount of quality information available on that site. Today, CMS is including five of those six new quality measures in the calculations for the Five-Star Quality Rating. The five measures include:
1. Percentage of short-stay residents who were successfully discharged to the community (Medicare claims- and
Minimum Data Set (MDS)-based)
2. Percentage of short-stay residents who have had an outpatient emergency department visit (Medicare claims-
and MDS-based)
3. Percentage of short-stay residents who were rehospitalized after a nursing home admission (Medicare claims-
and MDS-based)
4. Percentage of short-stay residents who made improvements in function (MDS-based)
5. Percentage of long-stay residents whose ability to move independently worsened (MDS-based)
The sixth new quality measure, the antianxiety/hypnotic medication measure, is not incorporated into the Five-Star Quality Rating because it has been difficult to determine appropriate nursing home benchmarks for the acceptable use of these medications.

See Also: Background and Methodology About Nursing Home Compare Data

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