starcube.blogg.se

Then be sure to visit facilities you’re considering to see for yourself.

So for now, if not forever, check out nursing home ratings from Medicare and Yelp. “I don’t think it will happen,” says Rahman. She thinks “a nice solution” would be if Medicare and Yelp collaborated, because “people would like a Yelp-like score” on Nursing Home Compare. Merging Medicare's Nursing Home Ratings With Yelp's “And the residents, don’t necessarily agree. Rahman also says the Yelp platform “has its own set of flaws,” although “they allow well-intended consumers to express an opinion about services they have been receiving.” But, she adds, family members often write these reviews. You can’t get great quality care when your staffing score sucks. “I’d assume they were lying about quality. “If I saw that a nursing home got five stars for quality measures, but two on staffing and two on health inspection, I’d move on,” she says. Her advice when using its ratings: look for nursing homes that fare well in each of Medicare’s three broad measures: health inspections, quality of resident care and staffing. Rahman is “frustrated” that Medicare has no consumer voice in its ratings system “even though we are supposedly moving to a patient-centric, family-directed health care system.” That’s not because one of the services is wrong it’s that the raters rate different things.Īn Expert's Take on the Medicare and Yelp Ratings

When Rahman and her fellow researchers compared Medicare and Yelp nursing home ratings, they often found four or five stars on one but not the other. And if the health inspections rating is just one star, the overall Nursing Home Compare rating can’t be upgraded by more than one star based on the staffing and quality of resident care ratings.Īt Yelp, anyone can post a review based on any criteria he or she chooses to use. Next, Medicare adds a star if the quality of resident care rating is five stars and subtracts one if that rating is just one star. To arrive at a star rating for a nursing home, Medicare starts with the health inspections rating, then adds a star for a good staffing rating or subtracts one for a one-star health inspections rating. Critics believe some nursing homes game them. The nursing homes themselves typically report the staffing and quality measures. Medicare requires on-site inspections every 12 to 15 months. Nursing Home Compare gets its data from three sources: the federal government’s health inspection database a national database of resident clinical data and Medicare claims data. When I did a Yelp search for nursing homes near me (I found 22), most had fewer than five consumer ratings. And even if a nursing home is rated on Yelp, odds are there won’t be many reviews. (You can modify your search by number of miles, the name of a nursing home, star ratings and whether the facility accepts Medicare or Medicaid.)īy contrast, it’s harder to find many Yelp ratings for a particular area. When I looked for facilities near where I live in New Jersey, I received 160 ratings. The Medicare Nursing Home Compare ratings are geographically comprehensive. Put another way, Medicare can help show how well a nursing home is run and Yelp can show what nursing home residents, or their families, say it’s like to live there. Rahman and her colleagues found that most Yelp reviews commented on “intangibles” like staff attitudes and responsiveness.

Yelp’s reviews are more personal and qualitative. The biggest one: Medicare’s Nursing Home Compare star ratings measure facilities based on quantifiable data. Why the 2 Types of Nursing Home Ratings Are So Different “We found the Yelp scores did not align well with the scores on Nursing Home Compare,” Rahman told me. Rahman and her fellow researchers looked at 51 Yelp-rated nursing homes in California they previously reviewed the Nursing Home Compare tool. So much so that Anna Rahman, an assistant professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology who has studied them, recommends reading the Medicare reviews as well as the Yelp reviews to get a complete picture. But the two types of ratings are done very differently.