March
5, 2018
Earlier
this year, the state Department of Public Health launched a new website, Cal
Health Find, intended to help people compare the quality of nursing homes and
other health care facilities.
Now,
California nursing home advocates are calling on the state to take it down,
saying the new site is incomplete, inaccurate and “a huge step in the wrong
direction.”
The
state describes the website as a user-friendly replacement for its previous
tool,
the
Health Facilities Consumer Information System. Among other things,
state officials say the new site allows consumers to compare up to three
facilities at a time, improves compliance with the Americans with Disabilities
Act and offers language translation tools.
But the
nonprofit organization California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform says those
extras are of little use because the content itself is wrong. The group
complains of inaccurate complaint counts for problematic nursing homes and
missing links to inspection reports filed before 2016.
“Choosing
the right nursing homes can be a life-and-death decision,” said Michael
Connors, an advocate with the organization. “This site should help them avoid
places that are likely to neglect them. Right now, it will do the opposite.”
State officials argue that the site is a work in progress that
is being refined, with updates to complaint counts coming this week. The new
site cost about $437,000 to build and operate, officials said.
“The
department has acknowledged and identified the source of the problem [with
complaint counts] and has already implemented a correction plan,” Corey
Egel, a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health, said in a
written statement. “The department believes Cal Health Find improves the user
experience. … We find no reason to remove the site while we correct errors.”
Deborah
Pacyna, a spokeswoman for the California Association of Health Facilities,
which represents nursing homes, said her organization also has shared some
concerns about the data with the state, but she declined to give further
details. She added that some nursing homes were complaining that pictures from
Google Earth did not accurately reflect their facilities, instead showing only
the street or a back parking lot. She repeated the state’s assertion that the
site is a work in progress.
Connors
said she remains skeptical that the state is taking the problems seriously.
The
state’s old website is still up, although it refers people to the new site. A
comparison of its data with that available on Cal Health Find showed marked
discrepancies.
For
example, the state’s old website shows that 90 complaints were made against
Lake Merritt Healthcare Center in Oakland in 2017. The new website shows only
34 for the same year. Similarly, while the old website lists 49 complaints
against San Diego Healthcare Center in 2017, the new website lists only 13.
Officials
offered a complex explanation for the discrepancies, including that the new
site contained more records so that it was updating more slowly than the old
one. Also, they said, the old site erroneously counted some deficiencies more
than once.
People
searching the new website will find no links next to individual nursing homes
for citations made before 2016 – those links are still there but, according to
the patient advocates, buried on the new site.
So,
the advocates say, an individual considering Oakpark Healthcare Center in
Tujunga, for example, may miss the serious Class AA citation from September
2015 that was more readily evident on the old website. That citation determined
that the nursing home failed to identify and treat a gangrenous wound on a
resident’s heel, leading to her death.
https://californiahealthline.org/news/user-friendly-or-error-ridden-debate-swirls-around-website-comparing-nursing-homes/?utm_campaign=CHL%3A%20Weekly%20Edition&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=61251773&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9_OUvwV0B1Ok-zi1kXsivehGQKjCvdxQbTiccXgS_d6JbDWTZj16HHDgSTMgaDWv4tEFYmjDbz6yltiEi76Ed2t_eM4w&_hsmi=61251773
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