In the two years since the U.S. Department of Justice announced the National Nursing Home Initiative, or NNHI — an effort to focus enforcement resources on substandard quality in nursing homes — the initiative has produced few public results, and seemed to have faded to the background amid other DOJ priorities.
However, the DOJ recently filed one of its first False Claims Act complaints against nursing home defendants for allegedly providing grossly substandard services in a case that originated as an investigation pursuant to the initiative.
The initiative's sluggish start may have resulted from competing demands from the pandemic, but the White House earlier this year made clear that it supports the policy goals of the initiative, and the DOJ almost certainly has more such cases moving through the pipeline.
The DOJ's data-driven approach to building these cases means that nursing home investors, owners and operators are well advised to take steps to understand how their own data may attract government scrutiny.