Evergreen nursing home 'improving'

By Dave Frank

Appeal Staff Writer

A Carson City nursing home named last year in a national list of worst-in-state facilities is "improving," according to the federal government.

Evergreen Mountain View Health and Rehabilitation Center, 201 Koontz Lane, was named on a partial list of "special focus" facilities by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in November, but also named as one of the 21 facilities improving when the full list of 131 nursing homes was released this week.

Evergreen is the only Nevada facility listed.

The report on Evergreen was based on Nevada Division of Health inspections that checked for compliance with federal health and safety regulations. The government can stop Medicare and Medicaid payments based on the inspections, which likely would force a nursing home out of business.

Facilities under the "special focus" label are inspected randomly twice a year instead of once like other nursing homes.

"Evergreen Mountain View believes strongly in the quality of care it provides its community and is committed to providing that care regardless of how large a shadow CMS has unjustly tried to cast upon it," the nursing home said in a press release.

It referred questions about the government's report to its parent company, Evergreen Healthcare, which runs nursing homes on Ormsby Boulevard, in Gardnerville and throughout the West.

It has nursing homes in Phoenix, Ariz., Centralia, Wash., and Livingston and Missoula, Mont., that also have been named "special focus" facilities.

Though no "special focus" facilities were publicly named until November, Evergreen Mountain View Health has been on the government list since November 2004, said Diane Allen, a representative with the Nevada Health Division bureau, which does the inspections.

Allen said the nursing home has been on the list that long because it has gone in and out of compliance with regulations. Evergreen's last "quality of care issues" were cited in April.

Their October inspection was clean, however, and if the next inspection also is clean, the facility will be taken off the list.

Evergreen Healthcare is confident this will happen, said Jason Smith, general counsel for Evergreen Healthcare, but the company has problems with the government's system.

The state doesn't process the appeals from nursing homes before it gives its inspection reports to the federal government, he said, which is not fair if the state has made a mistake.

The system also doesn't necessarily go after the worst nursing homes, either, he said, something CMS has acknowledged because it puts facilities on the list after states actually pick those facilities from a selection submitted by the federal government.

Smith said nursing homes that are improving should be taken off the list so the government can actually go after the worst facilities.

But Allen said nursing homes are not selected randomly by the federal government and have all been cited by states for "actual harm."

She also said if a nursing home's appeal is accepted, the citation is removed from the federal report.

• Contact reporter Dave Frank at dfrank@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1212. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

On the Net

Read the nursing home report:

www.cms.hhs.gov/CertificationandComplianc/Downloads/SFFList.pdf