Pinnacle Specialty Care

On top of receiving a great overall score, this nursing home also received first-rate inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher grades in that area, with an A. Our inspection ratings are tied to many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so well is that it was given a dominant short-term care score. Indeed, short-term care turned out to be its second most favorable category score. In that category, we gave this nursing home a score of A-. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home 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 6.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

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. The nursing grade includes many datapoints, however, the primary one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we scored was long-term care, which was this nursing home's weakest area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this category. Of course, this score pulled down the facility's overall grade a bit. Facilities that receive this type of score in long-term care likely don't provide the kind of consistent around the clock care that some other facilities provide. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 91.408936 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be slightly below what we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable figure. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.