The difficult hunt for evaluating nursing home vaccinations

As COVID rises, a vexing hunt for nursing home vaccine stats WASHINGTON (AP) — With COVID-19 on the rise again and many nursing home staffers unvaccinated, families still lack easy access to crucial Medicare immunization data that will help them pick the right facility for their loved one. AP NEWS

WASHINGTON (AP) — With COVID-19 on the rise again and many nursing home staffers unvaccinated, families still lack easy access to crucial Medicare immunization data that will help them pick the right facility for their loved one.

Medicare has a “Care Compare” website for consumers it has spent years refining. But that’s not where the agency is posting vaccination numbers for residents and staff at individual nursing homes. Instead Medicare is relying on a COVID-19 data page geared to researchers. One way to navigate it involves scouring a map for little red dots that represent nursing homes. There’s also a huge spreadsheet. It’s not seen as particularly user-friendly.

“Getting this on ‘Nursing Home Compare’ is super important,” said David Grabowski, a Harvard health care policy professor who has researched the impact of the pandemic on nursing homes. “Having it buried in a spreadsheet is really frustrating.”

Access to the numbers is critical because there are wide differences among nursing homes, and within nursing homes, when it comes to vaccination.

Grabowski’s analysis of Medicare data indicates that nationwide, about 78% of residents and 56% of staff completed their vaccinations as of the week ending June 20.

Statistics posted by Medicare reveal big disparities between states. In Alaska, 91% of residents are vaccinated, but in Florida it’s 69%. In Hawaii, 82% of staffers are vaccinated, but in New York it’s 62% and in Louisiana, 42%. Staff vaccination rates are important because infected staffers can unwittingly bring the virus into a nursing home before they develop symptoms.

Within states, there can be big differences among counties, and even among nursing homes in the same community, said Terry Fulmer, president of the John A. Hartford Foundation, which works to improve care for older adults.

“We now have a Delta variant and we could have a surge,” said Fulmer. “My concern is that residents will die and that staff will die, and it could have been prevented.”

Medicare’s parent agency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, acknowledged in a statement that it has work to do. “We are focused on making this data more consumer-friendly and easy to navigate,” the agency said. ...