Also serving the communities of De Luz, Rainbow, Camp Pendleton, Pala and Pauma
One recent Sunday morning, I woke up to a text message from a coworker saying she’d been up all night with her mother in the emergency room.
Her mom had fallen, broken her hip, and was getting admitted to the hospital for surgery. As you can imagine, my colleague was exhausted, worried, and facing some important decisions. Even as her mom was being prepped for surgery, the hospital’s care coordinator was asking which rehabilitation facility she should be sent to afterwards.
As a fellow official of the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), my associate has a better-than-average understanding of the healthcare system. But she’d never had to find a rehabilitation facility for a loved one. So she turned to an online tool CMS developed to help people find a suitable nursing home when they need one.
The tool is called Nursing Home Compare and you can find it on the www.Medicare.gov website. Just click on the button that says “Find nursing homes.” Enter your zip code or city and you can begin your search.
Nursing Home Compare assigns from one to five stars to every nursing facility that participates in Medicare or Medicaid, with five stars being the highest rating. These star ratings give you and your family an easy-to-understand summary of three important dimensions of nursing home quality: health inspection results, staffing information, and quality of care.
The goal of our Five-Star Quality Rating System is to help people distinguish between higher- and lower-performing nursing homes. CMS also wants to help nursing homes identify problem areas and to improve their quality.
Nursing facilities receive an overall star rating based on three types of performance indicators, each of which has its own star rating:
You can compare multiple facilities on Nursing Home Compare, as my colleague did when looking for the best spot for her mother. But keep in mind that star ratings are intended to be combined with other sources of information (such as a doctor’s recommendation) and shouldn’t substitute for visiting the nursing home in person. Indeed, after my coworker identified two possible facilities, she visited the one that had an available room and was pleased to learn it had high ratings for food service, something very important to her mother.
At www.Medicare.gov, you’ll also find “compare” websites for hospitals, home health services, dialysis facilities, medical equipment suppliers, and Medicare-approved health and prescription drug plans.
Choosing a nursing home for yourself or a loved one is a complex, personal, and often emotionally-draining decision. With that in mind, we developed a detailed brochure, “Your Guide to Choosing a Nursing Home or Other Long-Term Care,” which you can find online at https://www.medicare.gov/Pubs/pdf/02174.pdf.
Among other things, the brochure provides a checklist of questions to ask nursing home managers, alternatives to nursing home care, and the legal rights and protections of nursing home residents.
I’m glad to report my colleague’s mother is on the mend.
Greg Dill is Medicare’s regional administrator for Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, and the Pacific Territories. You can always get answers to your Medicare questions by calling 1-800-MEDICARE (800) 633-4227.
Reader Comments(0)