Lone Tree Health Care Center

This facility received a quality overall grade as described above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A- in this category. Inspection grades are based on many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

In addition, this nursing home also was awarded favorable short-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we awarded it one of our better scores in that category, with a grade of B+. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. 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.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. In computing our nursing ratings, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we graded was long-term care. We gave this facility one of our higher grades in that category, with a B. This facility proved to be strong in each category we looked at. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care ratings. One of the criteria we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 81.13207 percent of its patients. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, at least this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.