By DAVE RANNEY
KHI News Service

WICHITA — State officials say they’re close to launching a website for helping Kansans figure out which nursing home offers the highest quality care in their communities.

“It should be up sometime in April,” said Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services Secretary Shawn Sullivan, at a meeting of the House Committee on Children and Seniors earlier this week. “The idea is for this to become a resource for people to use when they’re having to choose a nursing facility for themselves or for a loved one. It shouldn’t be the only factor in the decision-making process, but it’s a resource that we feel should be made available.”

The new program, called Kansas Nursing Home Report Card, will assign each of the state’s 330 nursing homes a series of one-to-five ratings based on licensure inspections, quality indicators, staffing data, and resident satisfaction surveys.

The KDADS report card, Sullivan said, would be similar to but better than the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid’s Five-Star Quality Rating System, which has been in place since 2008.

KDADS, he said, has contracted with a national company, My InnerView, to conduct in-person interviews with roughly 7,000 of the state’s 18,000 nursing home residents.

Sullivan said that survey should be completed this week. The survey questions, he said, were designed to measure residents “overall satisfaction” and whether they would recommend their facility to others.

The report card’s quality indicators, he said, would be “risk adjusted” so that facilities that care for “higher acuity” residents are not penalized for admitting especially frail residents.

Quality indicators include the prevalence of pressure sores, use of restraints, undue weight loss, and reliance on catheters.

The federal rating system’s data, Sullivan said, are not risk adjusted and do not measure resident satisfaction.

The KDADS report card, he said, would allow users to find out which issues were of the most concern to residents in a particular nursing home.

Most of the website has been developed in-house by KDADS staff. The department’s contract with My Innerview is for $295,000 for two years, agency officials said.

Rep. Melissa Rooker, a Fairway Republican, said the initiative seemed like a good idea.

“Anytime a family is put in a position of having to contemplate putting a loved one in a nursing, it’s a highly emotional issue,” she said. “So anything we can do to help families not make those decisions blindly is a step in the right direction.

“I fully understand how confusing and frightening and unnerving it is for families to have to make these decisions,” Rooker said. “It’s a constant challenge.”

Debra Zehr, chief executive of LeadingAge Kansas, which represents non-profit nursing homes, agreed with Sullivan’s critique of the federal rating system.

“It has a lot of problems,” she said. “I’m confident that the one KDADS is putting together will be better.”

Zehr said her members “conceptually” support the report card but would encourage family members not to limit their decisions to information pulled from inspection reports.

“I tell people to visit the facility, drop by unannounced, talk to staff – don’t just take the tour,” Zehr said. “Go there afterhours or on a weekend. Talk to other residents’ family members. Call the (Kansas Long-term Care) Ombudsman’s Office, ask them what they’ve heard.”

Mitzi McFatrich, executive director of Kansas Advocates for Better Care, said she hoped KDADS would expand the report card to include the state’s assisted living and residential health care facilities.

Currently, she said, “there really is no national or state government data on these facilities that the public can access.”

Angela de Rocha, a spokesperson for KDADS, said the agency would explore expanding the report card after it’s had time to measure the initiative’s effectiveness.

To contact the ombudsman’s office, call (877) 662-8362 (toll-free) or email [email protected].