By Healthcare Facilities Today

More than 900 U.S. nursing homes have been listed by federal officials as not fully complying with a regulation to have automatic fire sprinklers in every patient area, according to an article on the GPB News website

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent a memo to state officials last week on the sprinkler rule compliance. It did not identify the nursing homes that are not fully sprinkler-equipped. The deadline for installation was Aug. 13, the article said. In 2008, CMS issued a rule that the long-term care industry had five years to install the systems in the approximately 16,000 U.S. nursing homes, where more than 1 million Americans live.

The federal rules came in response to the deaths of 31 people in nursing home fires in Nashville, Tenn., and Hartford, Conn., in 2003.

A facility can receive a deficiency notice that results in not being able to get payment for any new Medicaid or Medicare patients. But if a nursing home implements “extraordinary protective actions’’ to ensure patient safety, it may be able to reduce the severity of the deficiency cited, and possibly eliminate the sanction, according to the article.

Read the article.