CMS Brings Changes to Nursing Home Compare and Five-Star Ratings in April 2019

On April 11, 2019, CMS announced updates to Nursing Home Compare and the Five-Star Quality Rating System. The Nursing Home Compare website contains data, including quality measures and staffing information, for more than 15,000 nursing homes around the country. The star rating provides a “snapshot” of the quality of each nursing home.

CMS is making changes to the quality component on Nursing Home Compare that would improve identifying differences in quality among nursing homes, raise expectations for quality, and incentivize continuous quality improvement. This article provides a brief overview of these changes.

The Nursing Home Compare website and Five-Star Quality Rating System were created in 1998 to help consumers and their families find a nursing home and to encourage nursing homes to achieve higher quality through public reporting of nursing home performance