Cuyuna Regional Medical Center’s Care Center is among the Best Nursing Homes for 2018-19 identified by U.S. News & World Report. More than 15,000 nursing homes were evaluated nationwide and 2,975 nursing homes earned the designation. CRMC’s overall rating is better than average and its short-stay rating is high performing.
The U.S. News Overall Ratings assign each eligible nursing home a rating from high performing to poor. This rating evaluates the care of a wide range of resident conditions at the nursing home, including both long-term chronic care and shorter-term rehabilitation. U.S. News Short-Stay Rehabilitation Ratings define each eligible nursing home as high performing, average, or below average in the care for people in need of skilled nursing or rehabilitation services following hospitalization for surgery, heart attack, stroke, injury or other conditions. The data used to evaluate these homes come from the federal Nursing Home Compare program, and incorporate the nurse staffing, health inspection, and quality measures star ratings. In addition to these measures, nursing homes were assessed based on the appropriateness of the therapy minutes provided to their residents as well as the consistency of their reported nurse staffing across self-reported and payroll-based reporting systems.
Since its inception in 2009, the U.S. News nursing home rating have relied on data from Nursing Home Compare, a program run by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that sets and enforces standards for nursing homes. Significant updates for the 2018-19 Best Nursing Home Overall Rating included changing its overall rating methodology to put more emphasis on staffing quality, using staffing data only from April 2018 onward, applying additional rating indicators of care that CMS doesn’t use in its own rating such as whether the amount of rehabilitation therapy provided was determined by reimbursement or by patient-centered needs.