Heritage Health-Bloomington

Heritage Health-Bloomington is in Bloomington, Illinois. The city has 84,349 people. With an A- overall grade, we rated this facility in the top 25 percent of all nursing homes in the nation. Based on our analysis, you can't go wrong with this place. This facility's impressive profile was highlighted by its short-term care rating, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ in short-term care. Short-term care grades are typically employed to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who returned home from this facility. This place fared as well as just about any facility with 64.5 percent of its patients returning home. Most nursing homes are below 50 percent in this statistic.

This nursing home has earned near flawless government inspections recently. We awarded them an A in this category. Our inspection ratings are based on many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's inspection reports. Places that score well in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. We looked at the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses were with residents, in determining our score in this category. This facility provided 4.5 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is among the highest figures in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the more skilled levels of nurses. We were really impressed by these statistics. In addition to looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these datapoints as reliable indicators of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The last category we rated is long-term care, in which this facility received a grade of B. Although this turned out to be its lowest category rating, this is nevertheless a good grade. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. After considering the impressive nursing care provided by this facility, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 99.43503 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is significantly higher than most nursing homes. This combination proved to be successful as this place keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 1.16 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a substantially lower hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.