Rahway, NJ, July 26, 2017 – Alaris Health is proud to announce that Care Connection Rahway was awarded a five-star rating by The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
The five-star rating comes nearly a year after Care Connection Rahway was awarded a four-star quality rating in the area of quality measures, which is one of three measurement sources that CMS takes into consideration when determining a nursing home’s overall rating.
Administrator Jeanne Leus said of the rating, “When I joined Care Connection Rahway in 2016, it was rated a two-star facility. That year, we had our CMS evaluation survey, and with the help of our staff’s hard work and dedication, we were able to bring it up to four stars by the end of the year. That in itself was a great accomplishment. To see it now become a five-star overall quality facility is incredibly rewarding and a testament to the team’s commitment to providing our residents the highest level of care possible.”
Care Connection Rahway Dr. Kamran Tasharofi said, “At Care Connection, it is not how much we do, but how much LOVE we put into providing excellent care, which is something that has helped us earn this rating.” Dr. Kevin Lukenda added, “As a medical director here for the past two years, it has been a pleasure working with this most professional, dedicated and courteous staff. We take pride in every aspect of care, like our second-to-none therapy department, which is dedicated to enabling residents to return home and resume their daily lives as quickly as possible.”
About the Five-Star Quality Rating System:
CMS created the Five-Star Quality Rating System to help consumers, their families and caregivers compare nursing homes more easily and help identify areas in which people may want to ask questions.
The Nursing Home Compare website features a quality rating system that rates each nursing home a range of one to five stars. Nursing homes with five stars are considered to offer significantly above-average quality, while nursing homes with one star are considered to offer significantly below-average quality. CMS gives a star rating to each of the following three sources of information, which are then combined to calculate an overall rating:
- Health inspections: The health inspection rating contains information from the last three years of onsite inspections, including both standard surveys and any complaint surveys. This information is gathered by trained, objective inspectors who go on site to the nursing home and follow a specific process to determine the extent to which a nursing home has met Medicaid and Medicare’s minimum quality requirements. The most recent survey findings are weighted more than the prior two years. More than 180,000 onsite reviews are used in the health inspection scoring nationally.
- Staffing: The staffing rating has information about the number of hours of care provided on average to each resident each day by nursing staff. This rating considers differences in the levels of residents’ care needs in each nursing home. For example, a nursing home with residents with more severe needs would be expected to have more nursing staff than a nursing home where residents’ needs were not as high.
- Quality measures (QMs): The quality measure rating has information on 11 different physical and clinical measures for nursing home residents. The rating now includes information about nursing homes’ use of antipsychotic medications for both long-stay and short-stay residents, and the information is collected by the nursing home for all residents. The QMs offer information about how well nursing homes are caring for their residents’ physical and clinical needs. More than 12 million assessments of the conditions of nursing home residents are used in the Five-Star Quality Rating System.
For more information about the CMS Five-Star Quality Rating System, visit https://www.cms.gov/medicare/provider-enrollment-and-certification/certificationandcomplianc/fsqrs.html.
About Alaris Health
Alaris statewide network of independently owned and operated Member Health Centers offers a wide variety of services across a continuum of care, ranging from short-term post-hospital rehabilitation and long-term care specialized care.
Each Member Health Center is licensed to use the Alaris Health name and receive non-health related services. All health care related services are provided solely by each independently owned and operated Member Health Center.
For more information, please visit www.alarishealth.com or call (855)7-ALARIS for more information.
