Negligence or Intentional Coverup?

OIG reports on the nursing home’s failure to report traumatic incidents to CMS. With the gross amount of neglect and abuse that takes place in nursing homes, tools such as CMS’s Care Compare website are needed to determine if a long-term care facility may be trusted in providing for your loved one. The website exists to provide Americans with reliable information about the quality of care each nursing home provides.

However, many nursing homes have now been found to be cheating the system to manipulate the quality of care they’re reported to offer. In fact, 43 percent of falls with major injury and hospitalization were not reported or accounted for on the website. Essentially, nearly half of all serious falls are not being reported. These lies and deliberate manipulation were uncovered in analysis by OIG.

Individuals should also consider non-profit or smaller nursing homes, as OIG also found that for-profit and chain nursing homes or larger nursing homes were the most likely to lie about their fall statistics. Further, fall statistics were found to be worse among nonrural nursing homes and less reported for young residents, short-stay residents, male residents, and residents with only Medicare coverage.

Lastly, OIG discovered that nursing homes with the lowest fall rates on Care Compare were the least likely to honestly report all of their falls. Therefore, if a nursing facility is found to have a low fall rate, this is more of an indication of having a high dishonesty rate.

This is a pitiful catch-22 situation that our nation is now forced to grapple with: pick between the lying nursing home or the one is open about allowing its residents to fall and be hospitalized.

Simply because of the greed of nursing home directors, what was once one of the few tools individuals had to protect their loved ones against nursing home harm, can no longer be relied on.