MEDICARE Site helps evaluate nursing homes

The Web site is chock-full of information to help consumers choose a nursing home.
By SUSAN COBURN
STAMFORD ADVOCATE
As the elderly population mushrooms in the United States, more of us are in search of excellent nursing care, either for ourselves or our parents.
Until now, it has been difficult to compare key safety and quality data on nursing homes. A recent modification to the government's Medicare site, however, provides invaluable information and tools to help you objectively evaluate just about any nursing home.
The nursing home section of the Medicare Web site is at www.medicare.gov/Nursing/Overview.asp.
Look and feel
As with most, if not all, government-sponsored sites, the Medicare destination is well-organized despite bursting at the seams with useful content. A navigational bar identifies the key sections, and a "most frequently asked questions" link serves as an excellent mechanism to help visitors quickly find the information they need. Moreover, there is a site map available plus a site "tips" link informing visitors of a range of tools to make using the site as easy as possible (examples of some of the tips are which browser the site works best with and how to print an easily readable page from the site).
Contact details include a searchable database with phone numbers of agencies throughout the United States that handle Medicare-related issues and questions.
A quick tour
The meat of the nursing home segment of the Medicare site is the recently added Nursing Home Compare. Designed as an interactive tool, Nursing Home Compare enables Medicare beneficiaries and their caregivers to access comparison information about nursing homes by profiling every Medicare and Medicaid-certified nursing home in the country (about 17,000 nursing homes in total).
Comparable data included on the site are nursing home characteristics (number of beds, type of ownership, and Medicare and/or Medicaid participation), resident characteristics (breakdown of patients by disease), summary information about the homes during their last state inspection, and other specific details (number of registered nurses, nursing assistants and more).
Although the decision to place yourself or a loved one in a nursing home often comes about during a crisis or an emergency, it remains important to evaluate and rate all your options in an organized fashion. The Medicare site features a pre-assembled checklist to organize all the data you or a caregiver have collected on visits to nursing homes. Divided into the categories of activities and safety/care, the checklist offers room to mark "yes" or "no" to topics such as whether the home has an active volunteer program, if proper preventative care (flu shots, for example) is provided and whether residents may still see their personal physicians.
Links and funding
The nursing home section of the Medicare site offers numerous links relevant to this topic and other issues important to the care of the elderly.
Medicare's nursing home section is a government-sponsored initiative. There are no advertisements.