Moving ahead with its reform initiatives to make nursing home ownership more transparent, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on Wednesday began posting names of affiliated owners and aggregate data related to staffing and other metrics for ownership groups.
The agency made the information available on Nursing Home Care Compare and data.cms.gov; consumers are able to see how facilities are affiliated with each other and get a grasp on an operator’s overall performance.
Inspection data, staffing and quality metrics will be published on data.cms.gov for facilities that share owners or operators, the agency said. Viewers will also be able to see the number of Special Focus Facilities (SFFs), select enforcement remedies imposed, Covid-19 vaccination rates and a breakdown of for-profit and not-for-profit facilities.
“In doing so, CMS will fulfill the White House Fact Sheet goal to ‘track and identify owners and operators across states to highlight previous problems with promoting resident health and safety,’” according to an agency memo. “We welcome feedback from users and stakeholders on recommendations for how to improve the utility of the data posted.”
The updates come after multiple reports from the Government Accountability office (GAO), which found that Care Compare was lacking in infection control, cost, workforce and other critical data metrics.
The watchdog arm also found the presentation of information on Care Compare to fall short of transparency and ease of access goals.
CMS hopes these tools will help the public better understand and evaluate the quality of nursing homes with common ownership or operation.
Data can also be used by state agencies and CMS to gain more information about prospective owners and operators prior to certifying a new nursing home, or as government entities review change of ownership requests.
Efforts fall in line with the Biden administration’s reform initiative package unveiled in Feb. 2022, with ownership transparency and closer scrutiny of private equity in the space being core endeavors.
CMS began publishing SNF ownership data on Sept. 26, 2022, and at the same time started identifying groups of Medicare-certified nursing homes linked together by common owners and operators – referred to as “affiliated entities.”
This marked the first time CMS made such data available to the public.
Moving ahead, Care Compare will publish affiliated entity names and affiliated entity identification numbers for each facility. In other words, groups of nursing homes sharing at least one individual or organization owner, officer or entity with operational or managerial control, CMS said.
Ownership data is pulled from the Provider Enrollment, Chain, and Ownership System (PECOS), a Medicare enrollment system and national data repository for entities participating in the Medicare program.
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