Federal regulators are meeting with nursing home operators and other key stakeholders to discuss ways that resident and family satisfaction surveys might be factored into the new Five-Star rating system.
The conferees also will examine possibly using hard-number ratings rather than percentages in bell-curve fashion, using payroll data to determine staffing levels and determining how providers with high levels of short-stay residents should be treated.
Regulators have considered three possible levels of use for satisfaction surveys, noted Thomas Hamilton of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services during a special CMS “Open Door Forum” conference call July 9.
Hamilton said the three levels are not mutually exclusive and could be phased in. They could involve 1) simply noting whether a facility uses satisfaction surveys, 2) developing a system to judge the merits of such surveys and 3) developing a national survey that would be “objectively measured by a third party.”
From the August 01, 2009 Issue of McKnight's Long-Term Care News