Note: We will follow up on this later this week as we interview Lake County health officials about this new quality rating system. I don't know whether local officials have any control over local nursing homes, but will find out. vj
First, we had Federal quality rankings of school districts, then Federal ratings for health and drug plans, and now the Federal agency responsible for Medicare has just created a new online database to compare their quality rankings of Nursing homes in the US. Lake County had NO nursing homes ranked the highest overall level of 5, but did have one in the lowest ranking of 1, and another home in the lower ranking of 2.
You can search by state, distance from zip code, etc. Medicare now ranks nursing homes by several ranking categories with scores from 1 to the best of 5. Whoever said that government workers can avoid performance measurement? - it is coming, and those local government agencies that do not understand how to define and monitor quality and measurable performance indicators will soon find out when they appear on a ranked list of performance indicators.
US News & World Reports just published an article HERE which listed the best 10 states for Nursing Home quality, and Florida was NOT in the top 10.
We used the new Federal nursing home quality online database and looked up Nursing Homes in Lake County, FL by seeking all Nursing homes near the Tavares zip code of 32778. There were over 400 nursing homes in the "Northern California", and it included over 120 within 200 miles of Tavares. Since the list was sorted by distance from Tavares, we could easily see the top ones that were in Lake County. Rankings of 1-5 were given for the categories of "Health Inspections", "Nursing Home Staffing", & "Quality Measures", plus an "Overall" rating we used in the analysis below.
You can do your own search for Nursing Homes and Federal quality rankings HERE.
Of the 11 nursing homes within 20 miles of Tavares, including Lady Lake, Clermont but excluding Apopka, the results were as follows for the OVERALL ratings:
5 (best) NONE
4 Six
3 Three
2 one - Leesburg Health & Rehab, LLC
1 (Lowest) one - North Campus Rehab & Nursing Center - Leesburg (located IN a hospital??)
vj
