“Assisted Living Compare” Database in the Works?
The federal Medicare website offers a“Nursing Home Compare” website, which provides useful information on Medicare and Medicaid certified skilled care facilities across the country. The available information includes:
- How nursing homes have performed on health and fire safety inspections
- How the nursing home is staffed with nurses and other healthcare providers
- How well nursing homes care for their residents
But, as we write about so often on this Blog, the majority of senior care occurs outside of nursing homes, with exponential growth in Assisted Living facilities. Thus, it is interesting to hear that a commercial entity has announced it will soon offer access to data on assisted living places. From McKnight’s Senior Living News:
“For the first time, the seniors housing industry will have a single source for assisted living asset analysis, reputation evaluation, portfolio monitoring, operator benchmarking, clinical analytics, market analysis and consumer education, with a key benefit being that the burden is not on assisted living providers to submit the data,” Arick Morton, CEO of VisionLTC, said in a statement.
“We’ve categorized the citations so you can see where areas of concerns are within the different assisted living facilities based on some of the citation standardization work that we’ve done,” Jessica Curtis, Formation Healthcare Group vice president of clinical systems and analytics, told McKnight’s Senior Living.
Unfortunately, in the short run, it appears the database will be marketed exclusively to commercial players, including “operators, real estate investment trusts, lenders, investment groups and clients [of developer Formation Healthcare Group] who have expressed interest.” Curtis explained:
“It will be a paid subscription-type service for them,” Curtis said. “As a future development opportunity, we certainly see the need for this type of information to be available for consumers and the general public, and so that may be a consideration for a future version,” she added.
For more, read “Nursing Home Compare-Like Site For Assisted Living to Launch Next Month.”