CMS Announces Changes to Nursing Home Compare Ratings System

—Via CMS, WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 12, 2016)—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.

“When residents and their families are faced with important decisions about care, they need an easy, transparent way to figure out which facility is the best fit for them or their loved ones,” said CMS Deputy Administrator and Chief Medical Officer Patrick Conway, M.D., MSc. “With this update, star ratings will provide an even more accurate reflection of the services that nursing homes provide.”

CMS is committed to ensuring that residents, their family members and caregivers have the most meaningful information possible when they consider facilities. Nursing Home Compare is the agency’s public information website that provides information on how well Medicare and Medicaid certified nursing homes provide care to their residents.

Nursing homes receive four different star ratings on the Nursing Home Compare website (each ranging from 1 to 5 stars): one for each of the components—health inspections, staffing and quality measures—and one for an overall rating, which is calculated by combining each of the three component star ratings. With the new quality measures added to the calculations, the quality measures star rating for each nursing home, as well as the overall rating, will likely change.

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.

Find a fact sheet on this announcement here.

Visit cms.gov for more information.