The Concierge

With more than 25 options located in Houston, Texas, The Concierge is one of many options here. This is a grade A facility, which is a very elite grade. Based on our analysis, this place is really as good as it gets. One of the best aspects of this nursing home's stellar report card is its nursing score. Nursing grades are discussed in the next paragraph.

In addition to a phenomenal overall grade, this facility also received A+ nursing grade. There are numerous subcategories included in this grade. Many of these criteria relate to the quantity of nurse staffing. This facility provides an incredible 5.9 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Out of that total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. On top of offering high levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed as well as any facility in the nation in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

In addition, this nursing home received strong marks in the category of short-term care. As a result, it received one of our most impressive scores in that category with a score of A+. With our short-term care category, we endeavor to forge a sound gauge for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Remarkably, this nursing home provides about 50% more services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is a very favorable sign. Finally, we looked at the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy staffing, we found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in the country in this area with 62.3 percent of its patients returning home.

Another quality feature of this facility is its inspection grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Switching gears to our fourth category, this facility was given a decent long-term care grade. Although this wasn't quite as strong as many of its other scores, this is really not a terrible score. In the category of long-term care, we focus more on the amount of care offered by a nursing home, rather than more medically-intensive services. One of the factors we considered on top of this nursing home's very solid nursing hours was vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths for the aged 65 and up population. This combination proved to be successful as this place keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.