Nursing home research

Sarah’s grandmother in California needs a new facility during the rehab for her hip surgery. The current facility really blows.

I can’t tell you how hard this is to do this sort of research for a place on the other side of the country that I don’t know, and can’t return to very often except at great expense. And of course, I do product research as part of my job, but nobody’s grandmother suffers as a result of overlooking a detail in my evaluation of an e-mail vendor. There’s a lot riding on how well we handle this.

I searched for about an hour on the web, and finally came across this website run by the Dept. of Health and Human Services that’s absolutely amazing. Simply being able to find nursing homes in a geographic area is important, but it also shows the results of recent inspections.

As I suspected, the place Grandma has been in recently has a poor record in the area of bed sores, which she developed. They also haven’t been giving her the prescriptions the doctor ordered on time, and they were cited in three different ways on this topic.

While the computer can’t tell you everything, it’s given me a good head start on som nursing homes with better inspection records that I’m going to visit at the end of the week.

Check it out at Medicare.Gov.