CMS Increases Nursing Home Ownership Transparency

Last week, the Centers for Medicare &Medicaid Services (CMS) announced increased transparency of additional nursing home ownership data, including names of affiliated owners for the first time on Nursing Home Care Compare. Aggregate data on the safety, staffing, and quality for groups of nursing homes sharing ownership/operatorship is also now available.

In September 2022, CMS published information about the ownership of all Medicare-certified nursing homes. As part of that release, CMS identified groups of nursing homes linked together by common owners and operators, referred to as “affiliated entities,” which were included in the dataset. For the first time, data was made available that identified common owners or operators across groups of nursing homes.

In addition to posting affiliated ownership info, published data also will include the Nursing Home Affiliated Entity Performance Measures dataset on data.cms.gov, which aggregates safety, staffing, and quality performance metrics across affiliated entities. This will increase nursing home safety and quality data transparency among nursing homes with shared ownership and operatorship structures. States can also use this data to gain more information about prospective owners and operators of nursing homes before certification of new nursing homes and during change of ownership requests.

As this is the first time this information has been published, CMS welcomes feedback at NH_Affiliation_Inquiries@cms.hhs.gov from users and stakeholders on recommendations for improving the utility of the data posted.