Lone Tree Health Care Center

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A+ in this category. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies an immediate risk to resident safety or health. A few relatively minor dings are not necessarily something to panic about.

This nursing home's next best area ended up being its short-term care grade, where it was given a B-. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to qualify indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint 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 it performed well in this metric with 58.9 percent of its patients returning home.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. When calculating our nursing ratings, we look at both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 2.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in some quality-focused statistics. We like to look at the percentage of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. These datapoints are indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care can reduce these problems.

This facility's weakest category is long-term care, which is the last area we assessed. In this category, we gave this nursing home a grade of just D. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. One of the criteria we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 96.850395 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.55 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.