OIG delivers valuable stats in brief that might indicate nursing homes need improvement — or not

The Office of Inspector General released a huge quantity of nursing home survey statistics on Wednesday. Industry stakeholders and researchers should find them valuable for a variety of uses.

However, while the report title says the stats “show that improvements are needed,” its own conclusions and key takeaways did not go that far.

The title of the HHS OIG Data Brief is: “Trends in Deficiencies at Nursing Homes Show That Improvements Are Needed To Ensure the Health and Safety of Residents.” It is dated April 2019 but was officially released early today.

The brief analyzes nursing home deficiences cited by state surveyors from 2013 through 2017. Federal officials cautioned that the data should be cited carefully due to the many variances in practices and definitions that can be found among states.

The sixth of six “Key Takeaways” listed on the cover page might garner the most attention, given the lack of definitive analysis among the others: “The results of our analysis do not clearly indicate whether the quality of care and the safety of nursing home residents improved during our review period.”

The report was not requested by a lawmaker and OIG authors did not make any recommendations. Instead, they cited goals from a complementary report released in February.

“The findings from our previous report and our data analysis for this data brief suggest that nursing homes may not have been properly implementing systemic changes to ensure that deficiencies do not recur,” they wrote.

Other key takeaways cited were flat observations, with no causal explanations or deeper analysis provided:

• The number of nursing home surveys and deficiencies slightly increased each year from 2013 through 2016. Then they slightly decreased in 2017, the last year data was available.

• Ninety-four percent of deficiencies had “less serious” ratings and 6% had “more serious” ratings.

• About 31% of nursing homes had a deficiency type that was cited at least five times during the review period.

• Ten states accounted for half the deficiencies identified.

• The top 10 of 340 deficiency types accounted for more than 40% of deficiencies.