For nearly as long, there have been calls for reform. A Doubled Risk of Deathįor decades, nursing homes have been using drugs to control dementia patients. And when the pandemic hit in 2020, the trend reversed and antipsychotic drug use increased. Medicare and industry groups also said they had made real progress toward reducing antipsychotic use in nursing homes, pointing to a significant drop since 2012 in the share of residents on the drugs.īut when residents with diagnoses like schizophrenia are included, the decline is less than half what the government and industry claim. David Gifford, the chief medical officer at the American Health Care Association, which represents for-profit nursing homes, said in a statement. “If physicians are improperly diagnosing individuals with serious mental health issues in order to continue an antipsychotic regimen, they should be reported and investigated,” Dr. Representatives for nursing homes said doctors who diagnose patients and write the prescriptions to treat them are to blame, even though those doctors often work in partnership with the nursing homes. “We will continue to identify facilities which do so and hold them accountable.” “It is unacceptable for a facility to inappropriately classify a resident’s diagnosis to improve their performance measures,” she said. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees nursing homes, is “concerned about this practice as a way to circumvent the protections these regulations afford,” said Catherine Howden, a spokeswoman for the agency, which is known as C.M.S. The figures showed that at least 21 percent of nursing home residents - about 225,000 people - are on antipsychotics. To determine the full number of residents being drugged nationally and at specific homes, The Times obtained unfiltered data that was posted on another, little-known Medicare web page, as well as facility-by-facility data that a patient advocacy group got from Medicare via an open records request and shared with The Times. But that figure excludes patients with schizophrenia diagnoses. One result of the inaccurate diagnoses is that the government is understating how many of the country’s 1.1 million nursing home residents are on antipsychotic medications.Īccording to Medicare’s web page that tracks the effort to reduce the use of antipsychotics, fewer than 15 percent of nursing home residents are on such medications. Many facilities have found ways to hide serious problems - like inadequate staffing and haphazard care - from government audits and inspectors. Medicare designed the ratings system to help patients and their families evaluate facilities using objective data a low rating can have major financial consequences. High rates of antipsychotic drug use can hurt a home’s public image and the star rating it gets from the government.
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