CMS Launches Online Nursing Home Rating System

paul — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:53:50 +0000

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a unit of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has developed a first-ever quality rating system for nursing homes nationally. The system will cover 15,800 homes.

“Our goal in developing this unprecedented quality rating system is to provide families a straightforward assessment of nursing home quality, with meaningful distinctions between high and low performing homes,” said Kerry Weems, who is the CMS acting administrator. “The new information will also help consumers and families identify important questions to ask nursing homes and challenge nursing homes to improve their quality of care.”

In the new rating system, each nursing home will get a rating of one to five. These star ratings will flow from health inspections, staff information, and quality of care measures. Got to Nursing Home Compare web site at www.medicare.gov to see the ratings.

The criteria to rate nursing homes were developed with input from experts from academia, patient advocacy, and nursing home provider groups. The three ranking areas include:

Health inspection surveys. State and federal surveyors go on site annually at the 15,800 nursing home to assess health care services and regulatory compliance . Additionally, about about 50,000 complaints are investigated yearly. Ratings were developed from the three last years of survey information.
Quality measures. Using 10 quality measures available on the Nursing Home Compare web site, the ratings are further developed. These measures include percent of at-risk residents with pressure ulcers after the initial 90 days in a home, the number of residents with worsening mobility after admission, and residents receiving correct medical care.
Staffing information. This documents hours of care by medical and other staff per patient per day.

Resulting from these posted measurements, the public can see a a quality rating for each area and total score. The ratings are updated monthly.

“Around three million Americans depend on nursing homes at some point during each year to provide life-saving care,” Weems said. “Most of those individuals are enrolled in Medicaid or Medicare and we all bear a special responsibility to protect their health and welfare. Adding this new quality rating system to our Web site is a huge step toward giving our beneficiaries and their loved ones meaningful information to compare nursing homes more easily.”

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Research on “Cognitively Normal” People Gives Early Indicator of Alzheimer’s

paul — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:24:03 +0000

The build up of a certain plaque in the brain may provide an early indicator of the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and give insight as to the causes of memory loss in elderly patients.

“Because of the promise of these therapies, we want to identify people who are at really high risk for the disease, but don’t have symptoms yet,” said William Jagust, a scientist at the University of California-Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. He was aided in the study by Berkley graduate student Elizabeth Mormino and other scientists. Their work has been published online in the journal
Brain

Their research revealed that the higher the levels of a type of plaque called beta-amyloid that is found in the brain, the more likely that brain is to have a smaller hippocampus. That part of brain is where new memories form. Additionally, a person in this condition will have a more difficult time remembering things connected to specific times and places. This is called “episodic memory,” and examples include recalling what a person had for lunch or where they put their sunglasses.

The presence of the beta-amyloid plaque doesn’t necessarily mean that person will become an Alzheimer’s patient. However, Jagust said when the plaque, episodic memory loss and a reduced hippocampus occur together, it should not be ignored.

“These changes in older people are not necessarily benign. When you start to cluster them together, it begins to sound like Alzheimer’s disease,” he said. “And this suggests that some of the changes we are detecting in normal older people may be indicative of the subsequent development of Alzheimer’s.”

The study was conducted on 20 elderly people who showed no indication of cognitive impairment, and the results conformed to other research on people already suffering from Alzheimer’s. The difference-maker in this project is that it was conducted on “cognitively normal” subjects.

“We wouldn’t say they have they have Alzheimer’s by any stretch of the imagination,” Jagust said. “But the fact that these things occur together makes us consider the possibility that this is a very early change in the brain that could be leading to Alzheimer’s disease.”

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CMS Launches Online Nursing Home Rating System

Research on “Cognitively Normal” People Gives Early Indicator of Alzheimer’s