The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service maintains detailed records concerning all nursing home and skilled care facilities under its authority, including the 200+ such facilities within and around Riverside County, California. The CMS compiles its own data and data from other sources into the Nursing Home Compare tool, which provides members of the public with critical information about the quality of nursing home care in their region.
The CMS gathers its own data through periodic surveys of nursing homes and skilled care facilities. These data include citations issued for health and safety code violations; resident complaints and investigations into them; facility ownership information; the size and makeup of each facility’s staff; resident census data; information concerning each facility’s quality of care, such as the percentage of residents who suffer falls with a major injury and the percentage of residents who receive flu and pneumococcal vaccinations; and more.
Other sources of data used by the Nursing Home Compare system are the Payroll-Based Journal System, the Minimum Data Set National Database, and the Medicare Claims Database. These provide data on nursing home staff, resident health information, and billing figures, respectively. The Nursing Home Compare tool uses these data to assign every nursing home under its authority a star rating, with higher ratings corresponding to greater quality: ⅕ stars, or Much Below Average; ⅖ stars, or Below Average; ⅗ stars, or Average; ⅘ stars, or Above Average; and 5/5 stars, or Much Above Average. For more information, visit the Nursing Home Compare tool at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services website here.
It is important to note that none of the scores are intended to be an endorsement or condemnation by the CMS or Walton Law APC.