The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that updated nursing home guides for consumers will be posted on the Medicare.gov Care Compare website on July 31, 2024. The new guides are meant to help consumers and residents to more easily interpret the information CMS posts on Care Compare for choosing a nursing home, and to increase awareness of residents’ rights once they are admitted to a nursing home.
CMS will also implement the new staffing level case-mix adjustment methodology, announced in September 2023, for staffing measures reported on Nursing Home Care Compare. Beginning in April 2024, CMS froze the staffing measures while they made this transition. On July 31, 2024, CMS will begin posting nursing home staffing measures based on the new staffing level case-mix adjustment methodology. To minimize the potential disruption associated with the implementation, CMS will revise the staffing rating thresholds to maintain the same overall distribution of points for affected staffing measures.
Additionally, CMS will revise the nursing home staffing turnover measure methodology. Currently, employees on leave for 60 days or more are counted as turnover in the staffing turnover measure calculation. To accommodate this leave and ensure the staffing turnover measure allows for necessary maternity and paternity leave, CMS is revising the turnover gap to 90 days so that 60 days of leave will no longer be considered staff turnover.
Lastly, starting on July 31, 2024, CMS will post aggregated information on nursing homes and their residents on data.cms.gov. The data is collected from the CMS-671 form, which includes facility-submitted data obtained during each nursing home’s standard annual inspection and resident assessment data collected through the minimum data set (MDS).
Compliance Perspective
Issue
Staffing in nursing homes has a substantial impact on the quality and outcomes of care residents experience. Facilities must have sufficient nursing staff with the appropriate competencies and skills sets to provide nursing and related services to ensure resident safety and attain or maintain the highest practicable physical, mental, and psychosocial well-being of each resident, as determined by resident assessments and individual plans of care and considering the number, acuity, and diagnoses of the facility’s resident population in accordance with the required facility assessment according to F838. Failure to meet standards for quality of care can result in poor outcomes for residents, citations for substandard quality of care, and fines and other sanctions.
Discussion Points
- Review your policies, procedures, and staffing guidelines to ensure they are designed to result in provision of quality care for all. Review your facility assessment to ensure it addresses the needs of all residents. Update your policies and facility assessment as necessary.
- Train staff on their responsibility to provide safe, high quality nursing care or to provide support services that help meet resident needs. Document that these trainings occurred and file the signed document in each employee’s education file.
- Periodically audit to ensure staff are following policies for delivering safe, quality nursing care and support services. Ensure your facility assessment is current, thoroughly assesses the needs of all residents, and determines the resources required to provide high quality resident care and services. Review your QAPI initiatives to ensure that safe, quality care is monitored as an initiative of the QAA/QAPI committee.
*This news alert has been prepared by Med-Net Concepts, LLC for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide legal advice.*
