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Understanding Nursing Home Quality Measures

What are Nursing Home Quality Measures?

Information to help you use these measures and understand their limitations.

Quality Data

The nursing home quality measures come from resident assessment homes routinely collect on all residents at specified intervals during their stay (referred to as the Minimum Data Set). The information collected pertains to the residents' physical, and clinical conditions and abilities, as well as preferences and life care wishes.

Quality Measures

This assessment data can be converted into quality measures that give you another source of information about how well nursing homes are caring for their residents' physical and clinical needs.

The quality measures have four intended purposes:

1. to give information about the care at nursing homes to help you choose a nursing home for yourself or others
2. to give you information about the care at nursing homes where you or family members already live
3. to get you to talk to nursing home staff about the quality of care
4. to give data to the nursing home to help them with their quality improvement efforts

The current quality measures have been chosen because they can be measured and don’t require nursing homes to prepare additional reports. They are valid and reliable. However, they are not benchmarks, thresholds, guidelines, or standards of care. They are based on care provided to the population of residents in a facility, not to any individual resident, and are not appropriate for use in a litigation action.

These quality measures were selected because they are important. They show ways in which nursing homes are different from one another. There are things that nursing homes can do to improve their percentages. The quality measures have been checked and are based on the best research currently available. As this research continues, scientists will keep improving the quality measures on this website.

These quality measures are only one thing to consider when deciding about nursing home care. In addition to the quality measures, you should consider whether or not the nursing home meets your specific needs (for example, an Alzheimer's unit). Also, look at other information available on this website including facility characteristics and inspection results. You may also call your State Survey Agency or Long-Term Care Ombudsman for additional information (see Helpful Contacts). Finally and most importantly, you should visit nursing homes in order to meet the care team (like nurses, certified nursing assistants, and therapists), watch the care that is given, and see firsthand the quality of living conditions and the general nursing home environment. CMS provides a Nursing Home Checklist on this website to help guide you through what to think about during your nursing home visits.

Most of these quality measures reflect a resident's condition for the seven days before they were assessed. For example, residents were assessed for pain over the past seven days. Therefore, the quality measures may not represent the resident's clinical condition during the entire time period between assessments.

Page Last Updated: November 6, 2009