|
Volume 12 Number 143 News: Nursing Homes Senate Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is asking the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to create a public watch list of nursing homes that repeatedly have been found out of compliance with federal standards. Although CMS already posts nursing home quality data on the Nursing Home Compare Web site, Grassley said in a July 24 letter to the Medicare agency that some facilities "yo-yo" in and out of compliance and only temporarily fix chronic problems that affect quality of care to residents. Grassley also asked CMS to provide an update on where it was in implementing recommendations made by the Government Accountability Office in an April report on nursing homes that vacillate in and out of compliance, using state survey grace periods to temporarily fix problems found by inspectors and avoid sanctions, according to the letter addressed to acting CMS Deputy Administrator Herb B. Kuhn. Kuhn is serving as the CMS leader since former acting Administrator Leslie V. Norwalk left the agency July 20. In its April report, GAO said CMS should consider developing an administrative process to collect civil monetary penalties before nursing homes exhausted all appeals and that the agency should strengthen certain sanctions and enforcement actions where nursing homes are concerned (No. 79 HCDR 4/25/07 ). However, Grassley also said CMS should go farther than the recommendations by creating the so-called watch list which he said would supplement the Nursing Home Compare data by identifying what he called the worst facilities that regularly are found out of compliance with Medicare standards. He said the additional reporting of data would be an incentive for nursing homes to address quality issues. "If CMS were to make such a watch list easily available to the public, families could make this important decision armed with complete information about a prospective nursing home's quality of care," Grassley said.
|
