OIG issues report on COVID-19 nursing home data from 2020

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services collected complete COVID-19 data from the vast majority of nursing homes in 2020, according to a new report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General. However, for 775 of the 15,388 (or 5%) studied nursing homes, CMS did not include all of the COVID-19 data that nursing homes were required to report. In addition, CMS’ quality assurance checks were not always effective in ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the COVID-19 data for nursing homes. In its report, OIG made several recommendations for addressing this gap, including that CMS provides technical assistance to all nursing homes that fail quality assurance checks, and ensuring that CMS and state COVID-19 data are comparable in the same elements and are not substantially different.