Recently, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that it was cracking down on poorly performing skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) by making changes to the “Special Focus Facility,” or SFF, program.
The SFF Program was created to find the poorest-performing nursing homes in the country. These facilities continue to be inspected roughly twice as often as all other nursing homes ̶ no less than once every six months ̶ and face increasingly severe enforcement actions if improvement is not demonstrated.
Facilities must pass two consecutive inspections to complete the Program. The changes announced last week enhance the process.
To be forced into this program, there are three major criteria:
There are currently 88 nursing homes in the SFF program today.
We applaud the following changes:
The link below from CMS shows the current facilities in the SFF program.
The list breaks SFF facilities into three categories:
While this information is available to potential residents on the CMS Nursing Home Compare website, it does seem that a more proactive approach would be to require these nursing homes to notify potential patients of their status. It also seems that if only 88 of the over 15,000 skilled nursing facilities in the country are in the SFF program, the net may have been set too low.
Resources:
There has been a noticeable increase in payer actions regarding readmission denials, often justified as efforts to enhance quality of care and align with Medicare’s
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released in its 2025 Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) Final Rule a new Conditions of Participation (CoPs)
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