​​GAO Report Finds Care Compare Needs Fixes to Better Serve Nursing Home Residents

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released Wednesday found that Care Compare was lacking in some data metrics related to resident experience, among other metrics.

The report found that Care Compare, which provides key information on infection control, cost, workforce and additional critical measures about a facility’s performance, needs continuous improvement in order to enhance its effectiveness.

GAO found that the nursing home quality information the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) provides on Care Compare only aligns with 11 of 15 characteristics of understandability and relevancy for an effective transparency tool.

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“These characteristics include providing descriptions of key differences in clinical quality of care, enabling consumers to customize information, and comparing multiple nursing homes,” GAO’s report said. “However, GAO also found Care Compare did not align with four of the characteristics.”

CMS officials told GAO they are exploring a way to include information on nursing home residents’ experience, which Care Compare currently lacks. The areas in which characteristics were least aligned were consumer’s access to assess cost and quality information together, and the timeliness of reported information.

GAO recommended a restructuring of the Care Compare website to make it easier for consumers to compare and understand inspection ratings.

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“Care Compare is not structured to highlight patterns beyond the last three inspections in nursing home quality for the other components of information,” the GAO report said. “Without further information about trends or patterns in a nursing homes’ performance, consumers may not be able to see the extent to which the nursing home’s ratings have been consistent or varied over time.”

The move was applauded by lawmakers, who have been pressuring federal agencies to make improvements to the Care Compare website in order to allow consumers to more accurately compare the performance of nursing homes.

“As chairman of the Finance Committee, I pushed for a review of the Care Compare website, which is intended to provide our nation’s seniors and their families with clear, concise and publicly available information about the quality of care in our nation’s more than 15,000 nursing homes,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a press release. “GAO’s report found that this federal website needs further refinement to better serve our nation’s seniors.”