Dive Brief:
- CMS has announced the addition of six new quality measures on its Nursing Home Compare website to provide a broader set of data for consumers considering facilities.
- Three of the new measures utilize Medicare-claims data submitted by hospitals.
- The updates nearly double the number of measures regarding short-stays of 100 days or less and add information about short-stay outcomes.
Dive Insight:
The new inclusion of measures based on Medicare-claims data submitted by hospitals is an important shift because it means that for the first time, CMS is using measures not solely based on nursing homes' self-reported data.
Three key new measures look at rates for rehospitalization, emergency room visits, and community discharge.
The full list of new measures includes:
- The percentage of short-stay residents successfully discharged to the community (from claims data)
- The percentage of short-stay residents with an outpatient emergency department visit (from claims data)
- The percentage of short-stay residents re-hospitalized after a nursing home admission (from claims data)
- The percentage of short-stay residents who experienced improvements in function (MDS-based)
- The percentage of longterm residents whose independent mobility worsened (MDS-based)
- The percentage of longterm residents who received an antianxiety or hypnotic medication (MDS-based)
CMS says as of July, it will include all of these new measures, save one, in its Nursing Home Five-Star Quality Ratings. The one to be omitted is the measure regarding antianxiety/hypnotic medication, because of the difficulty in establishing benchmarks for nursing homes' appropriate use of these drugs.