Nursing Home Covid-19 Citations

Overview

With Covid-19 posing a dire threat to Nursing Home residents and staff across the country, policies and procedures around Infection Control have come into immediate focus. Since March 4, 2020, CMS has implemented Focused Infection Control Surveys (FICs) at virtually all homes nationwide, but it can be difficult to see which homes received a serious citation on those Surveys. To help anyone doing this research, we’ve put together this guide and the list available by clicking the button below.

Covid-19 / Infection Control Citations

Every year, each Nursing Home receives an unannounced Health Inspection. During this inspection, surveyors may issue deficiencies in several categories based on their observations.

After the onset of Covid-19, CMS stopped all Standard Survey activity and focused totally on completing at least one Focused Infection Control Survey at every home in the country. CMS has since allowed states to resume Standard Surveys, but they also decided to include the results of these FIC Surveys in the Five-Star rating methodology.

Read more about the Survey process

CMS also enacted a tough set of fines and penalties for any facility with an Infection Control deficiency on their FIC Survey. Each deficiency has a code or F-Tag, and this is the specific tag in question:

F880: Provide and implement an infection prevention and control program.

If a facility receives a citation for this deficiency, they may be subject to a fine, a stop on Medicare reimbursement (denial of payment), or worse, depending on the scope and severity of the offense. See the chart below for details.

Covid-19 / Infection Control-Based Fines & Penalties

The chart shows that facilities receiving a harm-level deficiency (Scope/Severity of G or greater – bottom two rows) run the risk of crippling penalties that could result in the facility being expelled from the Medicare program. Because of this, the list we publish above focuses just on these harm-level homes.

Facilities receiving Covid-era IC deficiencies at the potential-for-harm levels of D, E and F (top two rows) are also subject to penalties, the severity of which depends on their history of IC deficiencies on their previous two Standard Surveys. We track these citations inside our application and provide both an overview of their Pre-Covid and Covid-Era Infection Control deficiencies, and a full Survey history with IC deficiencies highlighted: