Heart of America Care Center

On top of receiving a strong overall grade, this nursing home fared well in short-term care. We awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Short-term care grades are generally used to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This nursing home performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. There are numerous subcategories within this grade. Most of the factors are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In addition, this facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. We gave it an impressive grade of B+ for that category, which is among our best scores. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This facility received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

Switching gears to our fourth area, we awarded this facility a grade of D for our long-term care category. This is the nursing home's least impressive category rating. Of course, this score hurt the facility's overall grade to some degree. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 90.07633 percent of its residents. This is significantly below what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this facility actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.