Litigation Support » Articles & Insight
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (January 28, 2009) – Nursing home financial data, long known to be exhaustive and cumbersome in nature, just got much simpler, thanks to a new financial tool available through the CFO Network of Little Rock. Nursing Home Financial Analysis Consulting Tool Suite (Nursing Home FACTS) is a database and query engine that contains the Medicare cost reports of over 17,000 nursing homes and can be used for providing analysis and transparency of nursing homes’ financial conditions. FACTS data is compiled of information from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal governmental agency tasked with accumulating the data nationwide. While FACTS’s primary target audience is trial attorneys who are representing plaintiffs against nursing homes, the data is also important for use by nursing home operators and others affiliated with the nursing home industry.
“There has been a huge increase in demand for greater transparency in the nursing home industry, particularly in the area of financial reporting,” CFO Network Managing Partner Allen Engstrom of Little Rock explained. “Nursing Home FACTS gives us the ability to analyze hundreds of data points that are reported in a Medicare cost report for any nursing home in the United States over the past ten years, creating a more accurate, and even dynamic overview of their financial picture for our clients.”
Engstrom noted that while primary-care issues loom at the forefront of nursing homes, overhead and resource allocation are of key importance to many stakeholders in the industry. Now these audiences have a powerful tool available to them to mine the information they need in a succinct analysis “to understand where the dollars are going,” according to Engstrom. Nursing Home FACTS meets the need to “see” greater financial and operational clarity in the reporting area of today’s nursing home industry.
Nursing Home FACTS offers two unique capabilities to users:
- Virtually any metric over time can be examined to compare changes to other factors, such as change in ownership, budgets, or strategy. This allows reports to be made that track events at the corporate level, such as a private equity buyout or a shift in strategy, and then to examine what the apparent consequences are at the individual nursing home level.
- A pool of comparable nursing homes, a “peer group,” can be built to review other nursing homes with similar revenues, similar number of beds, similar occupancy, resident demographics, geographic location and such. This means that a specific nursing home can be evaluated against other comparable nursing homes.
“The advantages of this information are profound,” Engstrom said. “It gives us the capability to track overall expenditures, examine potentially wasteful spending, and to get a clear picture of the true profitability of the nursing home.”
In short, analysts at CFO Network work with clients using Nursing Home FACTS to provide valuable research and analytical reports on nursing homes and nursing home networks.
CFO Network is an essential partner to plaintiffs’ attorneys in nursing home litigation. CFO Network has worked successfully alongside attorneys from coast to coast who have fought and won the most challenging and complex cases by using the right weapons to win the legal battles. The company helps law firms maximize their outcomes, whether that means settling for a greater amount, increasing the likelihood of a settlement or settling more quickly. CFO Network can amplify attorney’s effectiveness by giving them the resources needed to go head-to-head with powerful corporate interests and to win, whether that means at the negotiating table or in the courtroom.
To learn more about Nursing Home FACTS or to get additional information about CFO Network, contact Allen Engstrom at (501) 374-8123, ext. 224 or www.cfonet.biz/litigation.