Long-Term Care Survey Alert

Your rating could drop unless you let your facility’s strengths shine through.

Be sure to read the fine print in understanding just how the feds plan to revamp the Five Star rating program — to ensure your facility’s strengths still shine through. In addition to “improved reporting on nursing home staffing that increases the accuracy of data for staffing levels,” the agency plans to look at “other critical measures such as turnover and retention.” It also announced that it will implement these improvements to the Five Star system beginning in 2015:

• A new user interface designed to make it easier for consumers to navigate the website — and to clarify key metrics for both online and print formats.
• A new method for scoring each facility’s quality measure rating, which is used in turn to calculate the overall Five Star rating. The agency notes that “sources independent of self-reporting by nursing homes already are weighted higher than self-reported components in the scoring methodology,” but expect that staffing may play a prominent new place in the scoring system.
• Increased number and type of quality measures that are not solely based on self-reported data. This makes the rating system less susceptible to the manipulation of a few measures, and provides a more comprehensive assessment of the quality of care provided by nursing homes.
• Improved linkage to state-based websites for improved access to information that is uniquely reported by individual states.