Cranberry Nursing Homes Get Updated Federal Grades

CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP, PA — The federal government has tweaked the way it assesses thousands of nursing homes nationwide and Cranberry's nursing homes fared well in the first of the government's revised ratings.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services last month revised its inspection process and began providing improved staffing details and new quality metrics. The changes were aimed at providing
more transparent and meaningful information about the quality of care that residents receive.

Below are the ratings for each nursing home in Cranberry as of April 24, according to the agency's Nursing Home Compare tool. The site provides detailed information about every Medicare-certified nursing home in America. Nursing homes with five stars are considered to have above-average quality while those with one star are considered to have below-average quality.

• Sherwood Oaks
  

Overall: 5 stars

Health inspections: 5 starts

Staffing: 5 stars

Quality measures: 3 stars

• Cranberry Place
  

Overall: 4 starts

Health inspections: 3 stars

Staffing: 4 stars

Quality measures: 4 stars

Notably, the agency is once again providing health inspection ratings, which were recently unfrozen. Now, every long-term care facility has had an opportunity to answer questions using the new survey process, according to CMS.

The threshold for staffing levels is also much more stringent now. Under the previous method, automatic one-star ratings (out of five) would be doled out to nursing homes that reported having no registered nurse on site for at least seven days in a quarter. That threshold has since been lowered to four days.

Nursing homes provide round-the-clock care to people who can't be cared for at home and
staffing has the "greatest impact" on the quality of care, the federal agency said — more staff, better quality. The updates will hopefully improve quality industry-wide, the agency said, and give consumers more confidence in their decisions.

"CMS is committed to safeguarding the health and safety of nursing home residents by ensuring they are receiving the highest quality of care possible," agency Administrator Seema Verm said in a news release.

The changes appear to have had a wide-ranging effect. There are more than 15,000 Medicare and Medicaid-certified nursing homes in the country, and the CMS doled out one-star ratings to over 1,600 of them, according to Kaiser Health News. Most were reportedly downgraded because payroll records showed no registered nurse hours for at least four days. Other homes reportedly failed to submit payroll documents or couldn't be verified.

CMS is a federal agency in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It administers the Medicare program and works with state governments to administer Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and health insurance portability standards.

Patch national writer Dan Hampton contributed to this report.