Blue River Healthcare

On top of a quality overall grade, this nursing home also earned favorable government inspections in recent years. In fact, we awarded it one of our better scores in that area, with a B+. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

In addition, this nursing home also was given favorable long-term care grades this year. In fact, we gave it one of our better scores in that area, with a score of B+. For prospective residents seeking a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 89.94083 percent of its residents, which is slightly below what we expected. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facilities next best area is short-term care. We gave it a B- in this area. This is basically a middle of the road score in this area. In calculating our short-term care scores, we quantify 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 formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below the national average.

The final area we rated is nursing. In this category, we awarded this nursing home a B-. The nursing grade features numerous data points. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This facility averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which is a very low figure. Finally, our nursing scores also consider some quality-focused metrics. We look at the percent of residents who experienced pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these metrics are measures of the quality of nursing care, since superior care can reduce these problems.