SNF Quality Reporting Program Data Posted on Nursing Home Compare

On Oct. 24^th, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) added seven new quality-related measures to Nursing Home Compare. LeadingAge NY strongly encourages its members to access and review their results for these measures and communicate them to internal and external (e.g., hospitals, payors, and the public) stakeholders as appropriate.

Six of the measures are associated with the Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) Quality Reporting Program (QRP) and are accessible in Nursing Home Compare under the “Quality of Resident Care” tab by clicking on the “Short-stay residents” tab and looking for “Additional quality measures” at the bottom of the page. The seventh measure can be viewed by clicking the “Long-stay resident” tab and looking for “Additional quality measures” at the bottom of the page.

The six SNF QRP measures are:

1. Percent of Residents or Patients in a SNF that develop new or worsened pressure ulcers;
2. Percentage of residents or patients whose activities of daily living and thinking skills were assessed and related goals were included in their treatment plan;
3. Percentage of SNF patients who experience one or more falls with major injury during their SNF stay;
4. Medicare Spending Per Beneficiary for patients in SNFs;
5. Rate of successful return to home or community from a SNF; and
6. Rate of potentially preventable hospital readmissions 30 days after discharge from a SNF.

For the first four measures, the individual facility numerical values are displayed where available (i.e., if not suppressed or unavailable due to small numbers of patients/stays) along with national average values, but the corresponding New York averages are unavailable for each. For the fifth measure, facilities are identified as “Better than the National Rate,” “Worse than the National Rate,” or “No Different than the National Rate” if they have sufficient numbers of patients/stays. The sixth measure is listed, but all values are suppressed pending further CMS examination of how to best display this measure. The seventh measure that has been posted is the long-stay hospitalization measure: Number of hospitalizations per 1,000 long-stay resident days.

None of these seven measures are used to calculate the quality measure domain of the Five-Star Quality Rating System. Please also note that while some of the six new SNF QRP measures may seem to duplicate others that are already posted in Nursing Home Compare, they are calculated only for Medicare Part A residents.

A CMS fact sheet announced the posting of the QRP measures to Nursing Home Compare.

Contact: Dan Heim, dheim@leadingageny.org, 518-867-8866