Blog #3 Wild Card
Medicare's compare databases with a long-term care mission: because consumer perceptions of quality today may substantially affect tomorrow's healthcare revenues, hospitals should learn about and use Medicare's new long-term care databases
Healthcare Financial Management, Oct, 2004 by Paul L. Grimaldi
When doing research about quality, I ran across an interesting site that was very interesting to me. It was an article titled above that mentioned that now more than ever before people are not getting the quality they expected to receive when it came to placing there loved one in a long term care facility, aka nursing home. In the article it mentions hospitals that share a joint venture with long term care facilities “struggle” because the LTC facility did not even come close to what the expected revenue should be. The article also mentions that a second hospital is looked down upon because it has referred patients to a LTC facility that was of poor quality according to the patients, causing them to pull out and find other facilities. Also it states that negative comments were made from consumer advocates about sub-acute care facilities because of the poor quality.
Because of all these issues about poor quality and not being able to meet the needs of the patients care Medicare has come out with a program called “Medicare compare”. This is a site that enables the consumer or patient to be able to access online different types of LTC facilities and it lets them compare it to other nursing homes and facilities of specialized adult services. Medicare is hoping that this information will help educate the consumer in making the best choice to prevent future problems. This site is interesting because it provides basically anything you would want to know from type of ownership to number of beds all the way to what types of insurance it will accept. It also contains information on any place within the facility that is lacking, for example not meeting certain codes. If any one is thinking of putting a family member into a long term care facility, the best way to get the best quality is to be armed with knowledge about the facility.
Personally, I would highly recommend anyone to obtain as much knowledge on a facility before they place there loved family member in it. Make sure it has everything that you are looking for in a facility that will meet the patient’s individual needs.
The web site address is listed below; it is called Nursing Home Compare.
www.medicare.gov/NHCompare
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