“We do not believe this study is an accurate representation of our nursing homes that are filled with dedicated, heroic caregivers,” said Dr. The American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living (AHCA/NCAL) - the nation's largest association representing long-term care providers - took exception to the new report. “Of the nursing homes in 2017 that have the most, about 22% of them have a four- or five-star rating.” Everybody's underreporting, but consistently,” Sanghavi said.

“If everybody was consistently underreporting across nursing homes, then whatever CMS is putting up could still be useful because it allows you to still make comparisons. The researchers also found no consistency in the underreporting - the number of hospitalizations for bedsores did not seem to track at all with a nursing home's overall rating. “And so they should come up with other ways to get a different, more objective measure of patient safety in nursing homes.” “These measures that CMS publicly reports really are substantially underreported and inaccurate,” Sanghavi said. Similarly, the 2020 study found that more than 40% of major injury falls that resulted in hospitalization weren't reported, the researchers said in background notes. The new study found that about 30% of bedsores suffered by short-term nursing home residents and about 40% of bedsores in long-term residents were not reported to the Nursing Home Compare database, Sanghavi said. Then we say, did the nursing home report it?” “We know they had a fall because we have a hospital claim saying this is the reason for their admission.

“We're actually taking an individual person's claim and linking it to that individual person's nursing home assessment,” she said. In both studies, researchers compared data from the CMS site directly against claims that hospitals filed with Medicare to reimburse treatment for either falls or bedsores, Sanghavi said. These findings jibe with a 2020 study that found similar underreporting of nursing home falls that resulted in a major injury, said senior researcher Prachi Sanghavi, an assistant professor of public health sciences at the University of Chicago. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) established the Nursing Home Compare website in the 1990s to publicly report patient safety indicators for every nursing facility in the nation.īut the site appears to drastically underreport the number and severity of bedsores suffered by Medicare residents in specific nursing homes, researchers reported recently in the journal Medical Care.

People might want to think twice before relying on federal quality ratings to help choose a nursing home for an elderly or frail relative, a new study warns.

Cms nursing home compare reports