Long Term Care & Senior Living Blog

On April 22, 2024, CMS issued the Minimum Staffing Standards for Long-Term Care (LTC) Facilities and Medicaid Institutional Payment Transparency Reporting final rule.The final rule was issued a little over seven months after the proposed rule was submitted by CMS on September 6, 2023. During this seven-month period, CMS reported reviewing over 46,000 public comments submitted in response to the proposed rule.

On October 1, 2023, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CME”) will be retiring Section G, a measure of the functional status of nursing home residents, from the Medicare and Medicaid Minimum Data Sets (“MDS”). In its place, CMS offers Section GG, which places rehabilitation services into its own case mix component instead of including with other clinical conditions.

On Monday, February 13, 2023, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), a part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), submitted a proposed rule that goes beyond current data collections requirements by requiring nursing facilities to disclose additional information regarding ownership.

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) recently released the findings of an audit performed to determine the prevalence of incidents of potential abuse or neglect of Medicare beneficiaries residing in skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). Specifically, OIG looked at beneficiaries who resided in a SNF during 2016 and who also had a hospital emergency room (ER) Medicare claim containing a high-risk diagnosis code.