Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) has announced that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services gave its approval for a state program increasing Medicaid reimbursements for long-term care providers that offer private rooms and bathrooms.
DeWine’s announcement last week followed months of vocal support for incentivizing providers to transition to such private rooms — including a late-November executive order that declared an emergency and allowed the state’s Department of Medicaid to skip a traditional waiting period while implementing the program.
Once finalized, the program will add a $30 reimbursement bonus per day to providers for private rooms with private bathrooms, or $20 per day for private rooms with shared bathrooms.
The CMS approval was the final gateway before the state could finalize the funding boost, explained Pete Van Runkle, executive director of the Ohio Health Care Association.
“This is the final level of approval, but the state still needs to implement the approval,” he told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News Wednesday. “Providers applied for approval for the private room incentive payments starting back in January, so the state needs to review and approve applications that meet the statutory criteria. They also would need to set up the billing and payment infrastructure for the incentive payments.”
Private nursing home rooms have been increasingly praised in recent years for their impact on reducing the spread of infectious diseases and for increasing residents’ quality of life. Providers, experts and policymakers alike have urged state and federal governments to put funding behind the transition away from older nursing home layouts and toward a more private, household model.
“Private rooms increase resident and family satisfaction,” DeWine wrote Tuesday in The Columbus Dispatch. “They provide people with the level of autonomy, comfort and dignity they expect — and deserve — out of the place they call home. This is particularly important to those requiring specialty care, considering how personal the experience of receiving care can be.”
Ohio has not yet set a date for the reimbursement program to go live, but providers are already looking forward to its impact.
“It has proved to be very impactful,” Van Runkle told McKnight’s. “More than 1,000 applications have been filed from the 920 or so Medicaid-certified SNFs in Ohio. Because there were two categories of private rooms … some facilities filed more than one application. We don’t know the exact numbers, but many of the applicants are proposing to give up licensed beds to create private rooms, which is allowed along with purpose-built private rooms.”
