Nursing home ratings fall with new standards; Critics said earlier ratings were inaccurate, artificially inflated.

Byline: Katie Thomas

The star ratings of nearly a third of the nation's nursing homes were lowered Friday, as federal officials readjusted quality standards in the face of criticism that the ratings were inaccurate and artificially inflated.

Federal officials said they hoped the changes would make it easier for consumers to differentiate between facilities, as well as spur nursing homes to make improvements.

"You do need to raise the bar,'' Dr. Patrick Conway, chief medical officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told reporters. When it becomes relatively easy to achieve a high rating, he said, "that's not going to incentivize the same level of improvement.''

The changes that took effect Friday were mainly aimed at one of three major criteria used to rate the homes on the Nursing Home Compare website, which ranks more than 15,000 nursing homes on a one- to five-star scale. Officials essentially adjusted the curve measuring homes by the quality-measures rating, which is based on information collected about every patient.

Representatives for the nursing home industry said that rather than helping consumers, the changes could frustrate them.

"Any time that nearly a third of an entire sector is impacted by a change of this magnitude, there will be confusion,'' said Mark Parkinson, chief executive of the American Health Care Association, the trade group for for-profit nursing homes.

"We're not helping patients and their families get the information they can trust when the star rankings don't match the quality care being delivered.''

Advocates for nursing home residents described the changes as long overdue.

Nursing Home Compare has become the gold standard for evaluating the nation's nursing homes, even as it has been criticized for relying on self-reported, unverified data.

The website receives 1.4 million visits a year, federal officials said.

In August, The New York Times reported that the rating system relied so heavily on unverified information that even homes with a documented...