Where are all the providers and patients?

How does quality change through time?

Who are the providers to use (and avoid!) in Iowa?

Where are all the providers and patients?

There are 426 skilled nursing facilities in Iowa caring for roughly 20,200 patients.

The two maps below show:

1. Driving time estimates to each nursing home
2. Where patients are & how they're doing, in Iowa

This first map shows how far you have to drive to find good care.

The way to read the map is, if you choose the 15 minute drive time map and you live beneath a yellow region then you have less than a 15 minute drive to a 5 star nursing home. The color indicates the quality of care.

Using the controls below the map can also change the map to show a 30 minute drive and see how that is. You can also can choose between Overall star, Quality star, Health star, and Staffing star.

You can click on a state or county to focus on it. And click the "Clear Focus" button to see data for more areas.

Next, the dots map shows a colored dot for each patient in Iowa, grouped by county. We color each dot based on the overall star the nursing home earns.

Yellow is best. starstarstarstarstar

Click on one of the states or counties with dots to see performance summary for that area.

As you do you will notice that buildings with fewer residents, in general, have better quality.

How does quality change through time?

Medicare/Medicaid rate Nursing homes on a 5 Star scale. Both their performance and the rating system change through time.

These graphs show the quality of care the average patient receives in Iowa. And how that has changed through time.

Hover over the graphs to see the data values change

COVID-19 shows up in the data

The "Occupancy" chart shows how many patients are in this group of nursing homes through time. From May to September 2020, Medicare/Medicaid paused reporting that number of patients in nursing homes.

They started reporting it again in October 2020. In the "Occupancy" graph above you can see a little cliff drop off at that time.

Not all of that decrease in occupancy is from patients dying. Nursing homes also help people after they leave the hospital, but need more care before they go home.

At the start of the pandemic hospitals stopped doing elective surgeries. For instance, when a patient gets a knee replacement surgery some times they get extra care in a nursing home.

Because people were not getting those surgeries they did not need nursing home care. In addition to COVID deaths, that pause in the surgery-to-nursing-home pipeline increased the occupancy drop shown in the graph.

Steady performance, on average

With enough providers, most of the time the graphs above are pretty steady. Any blips are from changes in how Medicare/Medicaid evaluates nursing homes. So sometimes you will notice dips in the Quality or Staffing rating graphs. Thats when Medicare/Medicaid raised their standards of performance. And set the expectation for all nursing homes to do better.

There are two dips in the "Staffing" graph. The March 2018 one is from Medicare/Medicaid requiring providers to report payroll information. That made it harder for the providers to fudge their staffing numbers. The July 2022 one is from Medicare/Medicaid adding turnover and weekend staffing levels to how they calculated the staffing star. The thinking being that lower staff turnover means better care. And also that nursing happens 7 days a week, not just Monday to Friday.

It is reassuring to see the graphs come back up as the people working in the nursing homes do better.

Performance changes in space and time

The animation below shows performance across the state. The average performance across the state is mostly steady. But performance at an individual nursing home can vary quite a bit. You can see the # of stars stays almost constant but the performance mosaic changes every 3 months.

In the animation each colored region shows the performance of a nursing home in that part of the state, in each of the components of the 5 star rating. Yellow is best.

Who are the providers to use (and avoid!) in Iowa?

We here at PlainProof don't know anything about the people working or living in the buildings in this report. We don't know if their facilities are nice or shabby. We don't know if they are kind or not.

All the conclusions below are from the data the provider has reported to Medicare and Medicaid. We don't know if any of them will be a good fit for you or who you're searching for care for. But we do know whether they've been consistently good at providing care.

Consistently good care means above average care (starstarstarstar) for substantial portion (more than 75%!) of the nursing home's existence (or past 5 years).

Why does consistently good performance matter? Well because it shows they have systems in place that can weather challenges the nursing home business faces while continuing to provide qualtiy care.

In addition to our list below you can use these Medicare provided resources: guide for choosing a nursing home and checklist to help find the right place for you.

OK thats great, so who are the good ones?

Click through the 4 sections below to see alphabetical lists of providers. They are grouped by consistency and quality of their performance over time. There are also 211 providers that are kind of in the middle of the road performance-wise, that we are not showing you here.

Good, consistent providers

Providers doing well now.

Providers with consistent problems

Providers doing not so well now.

Where to from here?

Well we haven't made the analysis of why staffing stars are so low across the country or more general analyses of stars. So those things are coming sometime soon. And this data can change every month. If you want to know when we do add to this sign up below:

Want to see the same data about other, nearby places?

the United States of America nursing homes

Places close to Iowa

• Illinois nursing homes
• Minnesota nursing homes
• Missouri nursing homes
• Nebraska nursing homes
• South Dakota nursing homes
• Wisconsin nursing homes

Where is the data from?

To get money for treating Medicare and Medicaid patients nursing homes must:

1. Get inspected about once a year.
2. Send payroll information about every three months.
3. Report quality of care information weekly.

Medicare & Medicaid then take that information and boil it down into a 5 star rating.

On this page we have gone through some of that information and use our nursing home analysis software to do this data analysis for providers in Iowa.