Hawkeye Reporter

WASHINGTON – Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a senior member and former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, welcomed the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) report on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) nursing home quality information website, Care Compare. Grassley requested the audit as then-chairman of the Finance Committee as a part of his oversight work. The resulting GAO report found that Care Compare, which provides key information on infection control, cost, workforce and additional critical measures about a facility’s performance, needs continuous improvement in order to enhance its effectiveness.

“As chairman of the Finance Committee, I pushed for a review of the Care Compare website, which is intended to provide our nation’s seniors and their families with clear, concise and publicly available information about the quality of care in our nation’s more than 15,000 nursing homes,” Grassley said. “GAO’s report found that this federal website needs further refinement to better serve our nation’s seniors. 

“I appreciate GAO analyzing the accuracy and quality of data that goes into Care Compare,” Grassley continued. “I’ve worked hard to expose the dangers of over prescribing psychotropic medications in our nation’s nursing homes and how this over prescribing has gone unnoticed. As this report found, CMS must work expeditiously to test the accuracy of underlying data going into the Care Compare website, including the utilization of antipsychotic medication. Most recently, I’ve asked leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and CMS about their quality control efforts of key data following the HHS Office of Inspector General’s report on psychotropic drug use in nursing homes.”

“This GAO report makes it clear that timely information about a nursing home’s performance, along with patient experience, costs, services provided and much more, needs improvement. I will continue to work to hold CMS accountable to provide timely and transparent information so that families and seniors can make informed decisions about long-term care,” Grassley concluded.   

Original source can be found here.