Take Care Your CMS Survey Doesn’t End in Failure
For a lot of assisted living facilities, the CMS survey is make or break. Your facility is no exception. The job of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is to ensure that your staff, residents, and facility as a whole are up to their standard of care. If the surveyor feels that your facility is in violation of any protocols, they can enforce a remedy on your facility until you meet compliance. These violations can include sanitation, patient care, food quality, administrative conduct, etc. The surveys are purposely conducted without prior notice, so that the surveyor can experience how your facility functions normally with no time to prepare. Create a routine in which you inspect and self-audit your facility on a frequent basis. That is the best way to ensure that your will never fail a survey and receive enforced corrections, which will most certainly lead to a decrease in business and revenue. Here are a few CMS enforced remedies that can affect your bottom line:
1. Civil Money Penalties (Fines)
If your facility was trying to save money and your savings directly led to substandard care or mismanagement of your facility, CMS will fine you a total that exceeds the amount of money you saved as compensation.
2. Payment Denial for All Current or Incoming Medicare/Medicaid Residents
If you lose the money generated from your Medicare/Medicaid residents, you will be placing yourself in a financial sinkhole. You will be responsible for the health of a group of patients whose care is not generating any income due to your violations.
3. Resident Transfer
In some cases, your surveyor may feel like resident transfer is the only solution while your facility raises itself to compliance. You may find yourself in a situation with no residents, no income, and a facility to upkeep with staff to pay.
4. Temporary Management
There are supervisors who would like to blame the staff for the facility troubles, but that cannot always be the case. In cases of extreme violations, CMS will remove the current managerial staff with a temporary replacement to get the facility in working order again.
MyFieldAudits Will Prepare You for Your CMS Survey
Our standard health inspection forms, audits, and checklists will keep you organized. With the ability to share the forms with your staff, you can make sure that everyone in your facility is in line with CMS protocols and standards. Real-time access to all your forms will keep you up to date on the self-audits performed, any issues that come to light, and analytics that will help you improve and prepare for the real deal. To learn more about MyFieldAudits, contact us today at info@MyFieldAudits.com