“When the Trump administration required nursing homes to report their COVID-19 cases, it also promised to make the data available to residents, families and the public in a user-friendly way.”
“But some facilities that have had coronavirus cases and deaths turn up as having none on Medicare’s COVID-19 nursing home website. Those data may be incomplete because the reporting requirements don’t reach back to the start of the pandemic. Numbers don’t necessarily portray the full picture.”
“’The biggest thing that needs to be taken away … is in its current form, it is really leaving consumers in the dark,’ Sam Brooks, project manager for Consumer Voice, said of the website, maintained by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Consumer Voice is a national advocacy group for improved quality in long-term care.”
“Nursing homes are only required to provide CMS with data on coronavirus cases and deaths among residents and staff as of May 8, or more than two months after the first outbreak in a U.S. facility was reported. Nursing homes have the option of full disclosure, but not all have taken it, and there is no penalty for withholding older data that may reflect poorly…” Read the full article here.
Source: COVID-19 data on Medicare’s nursing home site is incomplete – By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, July 7, 2020. Associated Press.
