WASHINGTON – The federal government says it will launch a targeted crackdown on abuse of antipsychotics in nursing homes and misdiagnosis of schizophrenia in patients.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is beginning surveys at select nursing homes this month to verify patients have been correctly diagnosed with the psychiatric disorder.
Evidence has accumulated over decades that some facilities misdiagnose residents with schizophrenia or schizophrenia Administer antipsychotics to sedate themdespite dangerous side effects that could include death, according to the agency.
“No resident of a nursing home should be misdiagnosed with schizophrenia or given an inappropriate antipsychotic,” said the Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra said in a statement Wednesday. “The steps we are taking today will help avoid these mistakes and provide peace of mind for families.”
Some facilities could evade increased scrutiny of free antipsychotic use by coding residents as having schizophrenia even if they show no signs of the extremely rare condition, a government report last year found. Less than 1% of the population It is believed that he suffers from schizophrenia, which is characterized by delusions, hallucinations and thought disorders.
In 2012, the federal government began tracking when nursing homes are using antipsychotics on residents — this can impact facility facilities Quality assessment in a public database – but only for those who have not been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
According to federal data, the proportion of antipsychotics used by these nursing home residents has fallen to below 20% in recent years.
A November Report of the HHS Office of the Inspector GeneralHowever, revealed that the number of residents reported as having schizophrenia without a diagnosis jumped between 2015 and 2019, with 99 nursing homes across the country reporting that 20% or more of their residents have schizophrenia.
“The number of unconfirmed schizophrenia diagnoses has increased and was concentrated in relatively few nursing homes in 2019,” the report concluded.
CMS will launch targeted audits in the coming days to ask nursing homes to document diagnoses, with a focus on nursing homes with existing residents who have a record of schizophrenia.
Rating scores for nursing homes that exhibit a pattern in which residents are inaccurately coded as schizophrenia will be negatively impacted, CMS said in a statement released Wednesday, stopping threatening fines against facilities.
According to senior HHS officials, who insisted on anonymity to brief The Associated Press on the matter Tuesday, the agency has no plans to directly intervene in patient care or notify family members of residents who have been miscoded or treated with antipsychotics.
CMS will monitor the facilities to ensure the problems are fixed, officials said.
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