South Bend Tribune
The announcement earlier this month that Indiana officials will release facility-level data for COVID-19 in nursing homes is long overdue.
For months, Indiana — unlike its neighboring four states — has refused to publish this critical information, releasing only statewide totals for COVID-19 cases and deaths at these facilities. This despite calls from family members of nursing home residents, lawmakers and advocates for residents to identify the homes suffering from COVID-19 outbreaks.
Gov. Eric Holcomb gave the rationale that the facilities are private businesses, even though more than 90% of Indiana’s nursing homes are owned by county hospitals, which are units of local government — and heavily dependent on public money, receiving billions in Medicaid and Medicare payments each year.
At a recent news conference, Dr. Dan Rusyniak, chief medical officer for the Family and Social Services Administration, said the state is changing course after the largest associations that represent long-term care facilities and AARP expressed their support for providing facility-level information.
“As we have all learned, responding to this pandemic requires us to continuously evaluate our approaches, and when appropriate, to change them,” he said. “This is one of those times.”
Officials said that it would take some time to build a dashboard that will allow the public to search by facility, and that it will require comprehensive reporting by nursing homes of a list of staff and residents who have contracted COVID and when those cases occurred, going back to March 1. Preliminary reports released last week said at least 1,390 residents of nursing homes had died of complications of COVID-19 through July 14, making up nearly half of the state’s coronavirus deaths since mid-March. That’s 128 more than previously reported.
Data is still being compiled; the new dashboard is not yet up and running.
In response, AARP Indiana, one of the groups that had called on the state to release COVID-19 data for individual facilities, said that “it is our hope that this new dashboard will bring more transparency to the difficulties we have seen at our long-term care facilities during this health crisis.”
That transparency is needed. Gaps in public reporting have frustrated family members and don’t allow for a complete picture of nursing home outbreaks, according to a South Bend Tribune report last month.
(Individual counties have been releasing facility-level figures. Hancock County is one of them.)
During this public health emergency, with nursing homes in Indiana and across the country being devastated by COVID-19, there’s no justification for withholding timely and specific information from Hoosiers. It’s encouraging that state officials seem to have finally acknowledged the public’s right to know.
