Heartland Healthcare Center

With over 20 facilities to choose from in Austin, Texas, Heartland Healthcare Center is one of the multitude of facilities here. This is a good nursing home with a B- overall grade. This grade is right in line with the city grade in Austin. Based on our assessment, this place is a good fit for quite a few people. One of the best aspects of this nursing home's report card is its stellar inspection reports, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

The primary reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection score. In fact, its inspection grade was far better than its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave it a grade of A. Inspection ratings are tied to many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received a strong long-term care score. Indeed, we gave it a B in this category, which is one of our better. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 82.69231 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is slightly lower than we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, at least this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.28 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than many nursing homes.

This nursing home's third best category was short-term care. We gave it a grade of C in this area. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this area. With our short-term care assessment, we strive to forge a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at the nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home and found that this nursing home performed better here. In fact, this nursing home fared better than most facilities with 53.8 percent of its residents returning home.

The final area we looked at is nursing. We awarded this facility a grade of D for our nursing category, making this the facility's weakest grade. Our nursing rating weighs a host of data points. The most important factor is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This facility averaged just 3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is well below average. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.