Skilled nursing providers now have a new public set of nationwide quality benchmarks to see how their facilities stack up.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on Wednesday publicly released its Quality Reporting Program (QRP) data for skilled nursing facilities, listing five key measures derived from both assessments and claims. Available on the Nursing Home Compare website, the information allows individual consumers — as well as curious operators — to see how an individual facility performs against an overall national average.
For instance, CMS found that 48.57% of all nursing home residents return to their homes or communities without a hospitalization or death in the 31 days immediately following a SNF discharge. Just under 1% of all SNF patients experience one or more falls with major injury during a skilled nursing stay, while 1.7% develop new or worsening pressure ulcers. Finally, CMS determined that 95.8% of residents had their activities of daily living (ADLs) and thinking skills recorded in their treatment plans, along with related goals.
The fifth statistic, which compares the Medicare spend per beneficiary at an individual SNF against spending for similar episodes of care across all SNFs, only works as a comparison and not a nationwide metric, with an overall value of 1.01.
“These data can demonstrate how a SNF’s performance on SNF QRP quality measures compares to that of other SNFs, as well as to the national average,” CMS wrote in its fact sheet announcing the new statistics. “These data can showcase a SNF’s ongoing commitment to quality, improving engagement and confidence among staff, residents, caregivers, families, and stakeholders.”
A sixth metric, potentially preventable 30-day readmissions after discharge, was withheld on both a national and individual-SNF basis, with CMS citing a desire for more time for fine-tuning.
“Additional time would allow for more testing to determine if there are modifications that may be needed both to the measure and to the method for displaying the measure,” CMS noted. “This additional testing will ensure that the future publicly reported measure is thoroughly evaluated so that Compare users can depend upon an accurate picture of provider quality.”
Written by Alex Spanko
Companies featured in this article:
