Epione Pavilion

The main reason this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an elite nursing grade. In fact, we gave this facility a grade of A. The nursing rating includes quite a few components, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In addition, we also would like to note that this facility was awarded impressive short-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our better grades in this area, with a B+. This proved to be the nursing home's second best grade. In the category of short-term care, we try to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The next category we graded was long-term care, where this nursing home was given a grade of B- in this area. Long-term care grades are used to judge a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. We were a bit concerned this facility vaccinated 84.92064 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is quite a bit below average. Nevertheless, this place excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the last category of inspections, this ended up being this facility's weakest link. Inspection grades are based on a facility's recent inspection reports. We gave this facility a D in this category, which is not a very good grade. Since this data is collected by government inspectors, we take it seriously. Inspection scores weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. This particular nursing home had 2 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they created a threat to resident health or safety. Finally, we would like to point out that this nursing home received significant government fines recently amounting to over $100,000. This generally suggests that a facility's bad track record has been an issue for more than one year.