Users of the Nursing Home Compare website will soon be able to access and download more detailed data, including newly available information about inspections, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently announced.
Starting this month, CMS will begin automatically redirecting users from the current Nursing Home Compare website to data.medicare.gov to download information, according to a Survey & Certification memorandum released last Friday.
The new website will feature updated layouts as well as additional information for download. Some of this information is currently available on the cms.gov website but has not been offered through Nursing Home Compare. Some of the information has never before been available online “that we are aware of,” wrote Thomas E. Hamilton, director of the Survey & Certification Group at CMS.
This new information will include more detailed health inspection data, such as number of revisits required for a facility to reach compliance, the memo states. Expected and adjusted staffing data, a three-quarter quality measure average, and a comparison table of state and national averages for some data points will also be available.
The changes are meant to improve transparency and better inform the public about nursing homes, according to the memo, although providers have been underwhelmed by similar changes, saying that much of the data requires context and is likely to be misunderstood by the public.
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