CMS Announces Changes to Nursing Home Rating System

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has announced changes to the nursing home rating system beginning in 2015. Beginning in 2015, CMS will implement the following improvements to the Nursing Home Five Star Quality Rating System:

• Nationwide Focused Survey Inspections: Effective January 2015, CMS and states will implement focused survey inspections nationwide for a sample of nursing homes to enable better verification of both the staffing and quality measure information that is part of the Five-Star Quality Rating System. In Fiscal Year (FY 2014), CMS piloted special surveys of nursing homes that focused on investigating the coding of the Minimum Data Set (MDS), which are based on resident assessments and are used in the quality measures.
• Payroll-Based Staffing Reporting: CMS will implement a quarterly electronic reporting system that is auditable back to payrolls to verify staffing information. This new system will increase accuracy and timeliness of data, and allow for the calculation of quality measures for staff turnover, retention, types of staffing, and levels of different types of staffing. Implementation will be improved by funding provided in the recently enacted, bipartisan Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation Act (IMPACT) of 2014.
• Additional Quality Measures: CMS will increase both the number and type of quality measures used in the Five-Star Quality Rating System. The first additional measure, starting January 2015, will be the extent to which antipsychotic medications are in use. Future additional measures will include claims-based data on re-hospitalization and community discharge rates.
• Timely and Complete Inspection Data: CMS will also strengthen requirements to ensure that States maintain a user-friendly website and complete inspections of nursing homes in a timely and accurate manner for inclusion in the rating system.
• Improved Scoring Methodology: In 2015, CMS will revise the scoring methodology by which we calculate each facility’s quality measure rating, which is used to calculate the overall Five Star rating.  We also note that sources independent of self-reporting by nursing homes already are weighted higher than self-reported components in the scoring methodology.