Duluth rehab center earns five-star rating

Chris Jensen Health and Rehabilitation Center recently earned a five-star quality rating from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. On May 16 the Chamber Ambassadors helped the Center celebrate with a ribbon cutting.

Within the past year, the Center had remodeled areas for patients to improve their skills needed for functionally based activities that enable people to live independently in their own homes, such as doing laundry and preparing meals.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services created the Five-Star Quality Rating System to help consumers, their families, and caregivers compare care facilities and identify areas to ask about.

Each provider is rated with one to five stars in the areas of Health Inspections, Staffing, and Quality Measures. Care facilities with five-star ratings are considered to be much higher than average in quality.

“Do you look at the ratings of hotels?” replied admissions director Cindy Polzin, when asked why a patient would search for a facility that received a high rating.

Phillip Paulson, who recently completed rehabilitation for shoulder surgery at the Center said, “I understand this place is rated a five-star, but as far as I am concerned it is a 10-star. He continued, “They got me on the right track and doing things I never knew I could do.”

He also rated the facility high on how much the staff cares for the patients.

The Health Inspection score contains information from the last three years of standard- and complaint surveys of Medicare’s quality requirements.

The Staffing rating considers the ratio of nursing staff to patients, and is based on the care needs of the facility’s residents. The final category, Quality Measures, looks at 10 different physical and clinical measures.

Chris Jensen Health and Rehabilitation is a provider of short-term rehabilitation services, memory care, and long-term care, with a capacity of 170 residents. It is located at 2501 Rice Lake Road.

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