Effective Immediately: the CMS has made updates to the Nursing Home Compare Website and Five Star Quality Rating System. Under the COVID-19 Emergency Declaration Blanket waiver, CMS waived the requirements for submitting staffing data to the Payroll-Based Journal database (PBJ).
CMS is ending this waiver and facilities are required to resume submission of staffing data to the PBJ system:
- Facilities must submit staffing data for Calendar Quarter 2 (April-June) 2020 by August 14, 2020.
- CMS is encouraging facilities to submit their staffing data for Quarter 1 (January-March). This data will not be used to calculate staffing measures and ratings however, it will be posted in a public-use data file on data.cms.gov.
Quality Measures
- Quality measures that are based on a data collection period prior to December 31, 2019 (e.g., ending September 30, 2019); however, will continue to be updated until the underlying data reaches December 31, 2019.
- CMS is not holding quality measure ratings constant, as a facility’s quality measure rating can still be updated by a quality measure with underlying data that is earlier than December 31, 2019. For a listing of all quality measures and their underlying data collection period, please view the “About the Data” page on the Nursing Home Compare website.
Health Inspections and Ratings
CMS is continuing to monitor inspections, including the restarting of certain inspections (i.e., surveys) per CMS memorandum QSO-20-31-ALL. CMS will restart the inspection ratings as soon as possible and will communicate any changes to the stakeholder in advance of updating the Nursing Home Compare website.
To read the CMS release in its entirety please visit the CMS release.
If you have questions about how these restrictions or updates affect your facility, please contact our post-acute care team today. Please continue to monitor our Coronavirus Resources and Information Page and COVID-19 Relief & Operations FAQs for updates.
