CMS Adds SFF Information to Nursing Home Compare Site

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has added important new information to their Nursing Home Compare Website.  The site, which is designed to assist families in finding quality nursing homes in their area, includes information about nursing homes in terms of quality, staffing, and health, safety, and fire inspection reports. Now, due to the inclusion of further data, beneficiaries will have a more complete picture of the quality of care nursing homes have to offer.

CMS is now including information about CMS’ special focus facility (SFF) list.  A nursing home appearing on the SFF list means it has, at one point, had a history of poor performance or recurring infringements of state and federal health and safety rules.  

The SFF list was created due to the fact that nursing homes with poorer quality of care were often able to pass a survey by simply making slight improvements.  However, because they were not adequately attending to the issues causing the problems, they would fail the next.   The SFF list identifies the nursing homes that have serious quality of care problems and are not making any real improvements. It also includes the category they are in, like “new additions”, “not improved”, “improving”, “recently graduated”, or “no longer in the Medicare and Medicaid programs”.  When a nursing home becomes an SFF, twice the number of standard surveys is given to it, and the state survey agency will increase enforcement until the home improves and graduates, is given more time due to some improvements, or is terminated from Medicare and Medicaid. Currently, there are 16,000 active nursing homes, 134 of which are on the SFF list.  The hope is that as nursing homes improve, they can graduate from the program.

The SFF information can now be found on the Nursing Home Compare site, at www.medicare.gov.