California’s Temecula Valley Region has 81 nursing homes and skilled care facilities licensed by Medicare and Medicaid. That number is expected to increase as the world’s greatest generation ages. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) executes inspections on all licensed facilities. These inspections resulted in reports, data made available to the public, and sometimes penalties. For each facility, the results from the last three inspections are made available in the database.
Data available for each facility include:
- Information about recent complaint investigations;
- Penalties resulting from those investigations;
- Outcomes of revisits following inspections;
- Health inspection data;
- Total staffing and RN staffing;
- Quality of resident care;
- Resident census;
- Fire and safety inspections;
- Ownership information.
This data was made available to the public by the CMS as a public service. However, the CMS database is not the only source of information used to create the Nursing Home Compare Tools. Other databases include:
- Payroll-Based Journal System – this system allows nursing homes to report their staffing data with respect to the resident census.
- Minimum Data Set National Database – data found here are entered by the nursing homes themselves. They use this data to manage all their resident’s health collectively as well as at an individual level.
- Medicare Claims Database – these data describe care from the perspective of billing. Discharges and readmissions are indicators of the care given to a resident.
After collecting data from these sources, the CMS developed a grading system. Each facility is given an overall star rating and is graded in several sub-categories (listed above). Each grade is out of 5 stars. The more stars which are awarded, the better the score.
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.