The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released memo QSO-25-20-NH on June 18 announcing several changes to Nursing Home Care Compare.
Beginning with the July quarterly refresh, CMS will use only two standard survey cycles to compute health inspection ratings, rather than the last three standard surveys. The past three years of complaint surveys will continue to be calculated, and weights have been adjusted so that the most recent standard survey and the past 12 months of complaints will account for 75% of the health inspection rating and the second most recent standard survey and complaint surveys occurring in the past two and three years will account for 25% of the health inspection score.
Also beginning with the July refresh, CMS will begin displaying performance data for affiliated entities on nursing homes’ profile pages, and COVID vaccination metrics will be removed from providers’ main profile pages.
LeadingAge notes, however, the removal of these metrics appears only to apply to the metrics on the main profile pages that were updated monthly based on the most recent National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) data. There has been no indication that CMS will be removing the vaccination coverage measures from the Quality Measures domain, and removal of these measures from the Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) Quality Reporting Program (QRP) would require regulatory action.
Lastly, beginning with the October quarterly refresh, CMS will make adjustments to the long-stay antipsychotics measure to utilize data from Medicare and Medicaid cost reports in addition to data from the Minimum Data Set (MDS) assessment. The addition of this data is anticipated to result in increased rates of reported antipsychotic usage.
