The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) had added significant information to its Nursing Home Compare web site; for the first time, information about nursing homes on the web site will list whether a home is or has been on CMS’s special focus facility (SFF) list. The agency’s SFF initiative gives heightened scrutiny to nursing homes that have a history of poor performance or repeated violations of state and federal health and safety rules.
The SFF initiative was created because a number of facilities were consistently providing poor quality of care, yet were periodically instituting enough improvement that they would pass one survey only to fail the next (for many of the same problems as before). Such facilities with a “yo-yo” compliance history rarely addressed underlying systemic problems that were giving rise to repeated cycles of serious deficiencies. As of this month, there are 134 SFFs, out of about 16,000 active nursing homes.
Nursing homes that have the SFF designation, including information about that designation, will now be noted on Nursing Home Compare. The web site will be updated with new information quarterly. Read the background information.
