People might want to think twice before relying on federal quality ratings to help choose a nursing home for an elderly or frail relative, a new study warns. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) established the Nursing Home Compare website in the 1990s to publicly report patient safety indicators for every nursing facility in the nation. But the site appears to drastically underreport the number and severity of bedsores suffered by Medicare residents in specific nursing homes, researchers reported recently in the journal Medical Care.
