Aspen Hills Healthcare Center

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our highest scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively insignificant. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

One of this facility's more favorable category grades was in the category of long-term care. This turned out to be its second most respectable category. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of B-. With our long-term care score, we assess the volume of care offered by a nursing home, along with some quality datapoints. On top of considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 93.44774 percent of its residents. This is somewhat below what we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. Nevertheless, this nursing home excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next area we analyzed is short-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. In forming our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Unfortunately, it does not look like this nursing home submitted data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final metric we considered in this category is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 5.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Moving on to our fourth category, this facility was awarded a C for nursing, which is a decent rating. Our nursing grade consists of a handful of components, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a low total compared with most other facilities. Finally, although this facility got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in some of our quality metrics. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed well in this statistic.