For example, "many facilities were intentionally admitting residents from hospitals," he said.ĭuring testimony Thursday before a House committee, CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD, touted the new website. The CMS technical official on the call also noted that just finding COVID-19 in a nursing home does not automatically mean the facility was non-compliant with infection control guidelines. It has also increased the penalties and fines around deficiencies found during such investigations.
There could be some lax practices around isolating patients."Īdditionally, CMS is asking states to conduct focused infection control surveys or inspections whenever a nursing home facility has three diagnosed cases of COVID-19. "There are some staff that may not be washing their hands at the frequency we suggest, or in the situations we suggest. When you (inspectors) go into the nursing home, the staff know they're being observed and particularly on that day they go in, they're looking for things they may not see on that particular visit, but when the inspector leaves the nursing home, things can change, right?" She responded that inspections occur at "a point in time. Some states include residents of assisted living facilities, while others do not. Verma emphasized that a prior problem with getting good data was that "every state was doing this a little bit differently, and now we have a national standard way of looking at nursing homes."įor example, some states count a COVID-19-infected nursing home patient who was transferred to a hospital and died there as a death in one of their residents, while other states attribute that resident's in-hospital death to that hospital.
The link to the data, which will be updated weekly, can be accessed on the CMS's Nursing Home Compare website or downloaded as a spreadsheet and filtered or sorted. The data, along with focused infection control inspections of nursing homes, Verma said, will "inform a number of new regulatory policies to protect nursing home residents." "This sort of national data from nursing homes is unprecedented and constitutes the backbone of a national COVID-19 virus surveillance system," Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma said Thursday during a press call. Of the facilities that reported, 25% reported cases or deaths.
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