Government Launches Nursing Home Rat...( Five-star rankings aim to help famili...),Health

Five-star rankings aim to help families choose best option

THURSDAY, Dec. 18 (HealthDay News) -- The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services unveiled an updated Web site Thursday intended to make choosing a nursing home easier for elderly Americans and their families.

The updated Nursing Home Compare site uses a five-star rating system, similar to that used for hotels and motels, to rank institutions nationwide.

"The old site had a lot of information, but the information wasn't necessarily terribly usable by the average consumer. You knew if the facility was above or below the state average, but you didn't know what that meant," said Charles Phillips, a professor of health policy and management at Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Rural Public Health, in College Station. "What you have with the five-star system is a very well-thought-out way of summarizing all of that information that was available on the earlier site with new information. … This allows you to do a much more direct comparison in a user-friendly way."

Roughly 10 percent of the facilities have five stars and roughly 20 percent have one star, said Phillips, who served on the advisory panel that developed the rating system.

Geriatric experts, however, were concerned the site might not reflect patients' and families' true concerns.

"My reaction [to the site] is I have never been asked any of these questions because people assume good medical care, maybe incorrectly," said Debra Greenberg, a senior social worker in the division of geriatrics instruction at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. "There are other quality-of-life issues they are very concerned about -- the atmosphere, cleanliness, ratio of nursing professionals, the ability to go visit. None of that is reflected in what gives this a five-star rating."

Dr. Laurie Jacobs, director of the Resnick Ger
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