Six New Quality Measures, Including Readmission and ED Visit Measures, for Nursing Homes

​Six new quality measures will be added to Nursing Home Compare beginning in April 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced during a March 3, 2016, open-door forum. The four new measures that relate to short-stay patients are the percentage who were successfully discharged to the community within 100 days, the percentage who have had an outpatient emergency department (ED) visit within 30 days of nursing home admission, the percentage who were rehospitalized within 30 days after a nursing home admission, and the percentage who made improvements in function during their stay. Although the functional improvement measure is based on the Minimum Data Set (MDS), the other three short-stay measures are claims based. The addition of the short-stay measures "will greatly increase the number of short-stay measures that we have," said Ed Mortimore, PhD, technical director, division of nursing homes, CMS.