In an effort to make nursing home vaccination data easier to follow and find, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) this week launched a new tool to compare vaccination rates at any federally funded facility in the country.
Found at Medicare.gov’s Care Compare feature, the new tool uses data reported by nursing homes to the Centers for Disease Control’s National Healthcare Safety Network.
It includes information on the percentage of residents and staff who have been vaccinated in an individual nursing home, along with state and national rates. It can be used to compare one skilled nursing facility to others based on proximity and their overall rating.
Medicare and Medicaid-certified nursing homes have been required to report weekly COVID-19 vaccination data for both residents and staff since May, which gets posted to the CMS COVID-19 nursing home data website.
Vaccination rates continue to vary widely from state-to-state and facility-to-facility with the national percent of vaccinated residents now at 84.1%, according to CMS. A sizeable gap remains between nursing home staff and resident vaccination rates with 63.7% of staff are vaccinated per facility nationwide.staff now vaccinated nationwide.
“CMS wants to empower nursing home residents, their families and caregivers with the information they need when choosing care providers for their loved ones,” CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said in the press release.
“CMS knows that nursing home staff want to protect their residents and is calling on them to get vaccinated now,” she added.
The Biden administration announced on Aug. 18 that all nursing home staff must be vaccinated against COVID-19 or risk losing Medicare and Medicaid funding, but after outcry from nursing home operators that they felt “singled out”, the mandate has since expanded to include any provider.
This includes hospitals, home-health agencies, ambulatory surgical settings and dialysis centers, among others.
While some operators, such as Genesis HealthCare and PruittHealth, elected to require vaccines for their staff prior to Biden’s decision, many did not.
Booster shots starting Sept. 20, extending federal reimbursement to states for eligible COVID-19 emergency response costs and mobilizing National Guard personnel were other aspects of Biden’s plan.
CMS is developing an interim final rule on the mandate that will be issued in October and expects certified facilities to comply with the new requirements.
