The owner of a nursing home can significantly impact the quality of care that home’s residents receive, research has shown. One owner’s influence can be widespread: Nearly one-fifth of people or companies who report an ownership interest in a nursing home have a financial stake in five or more homes, according to data from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. Nearly 100 owners have direct or indirect ownership in 50 or more homes.
One such owner, Benjamin Landa, was nominated by President Donald Trump in October to be ambassador to Hungary. ProPublica reported Monday that Pinnacle Multicare Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, which Landa co-owns, is suing the Trump administration following a Department of Health and Human Services audit that estimated more than $30 million in Medicare overpayments had been made to the facility.
An attorney for Landa denied wrongdoing in a statement, saying the issues identified in the audit occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic when nursing homes were in the midst of a crisis.
To give the public more insight into who owns American nursing homes, ProPublica has added the ability to search by owner, manager or officer name to Nursing Home Inspect, our database that helps you find issues that federal inspectors have identified in more than 14,000 facilities. The update allows users to find all references to an owner’s name across homes and filter results based on location or the person’s role in the nursing home.
ProPublica already publishes data provided by CMS on “affiliated entities,” groups of homes determined to share an owner, officer or entity with managerial control. However, these groups do not always capture every home a person or company has a relationship with. For example, CMS lists Landa as an affiliated entity associated with 55 nursing homes across four states. But the name “Benjamin Landa” appears in the CMS ownership data for 102 nursing homes in eight states.
To make connections between owners more visible, if you search for a specific person or company name, the database now also surfaces others who frequently appear alongside the searched name.
ProPublica plans to continue improving Nursing Home Inspect in the coming months. If you write a story using the ownership search, come across issues or have ideas for improvements, please let us know!
The post ProPublica Adds Ownership Search to Nursing Home Inspect Database appeared first on ProPublica.
This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by Ruth Talbot.