The following answer was provided by CMS on April 24, 2020 in QSO-20-28-NH:

The CMS memorandum (QSO-20-14-NH (Revised)) states that health care workers who do not work in a nursing home, such as hospice workers, surveyors, Emergency Medical Services (EMS) personnel, or dialysis technicians, should be permitted to come into the facility as long as they meet the CDC guidelines for health care workers. Facilities should screen health care workers based on this CDC guidance with exceptions made for urgent entry to deliver emergency care (e.g., EMS) so they can attend to the emergency without delay. We note that the memorandum does not (and cannot) describe every type of service, person, or scenario that may exist in facilities. There are likely other types of health care workers that can be permitted to enter the facility (e.g., lab technicians, radiology technicians, home health nurses, etc.). However, CMS cannot and should not dictate every situation in which a provider could enter a nursing home, because, again, such decisions should be made by nursing homes in consultation with patients, residents, family members, and the other health care provider.

To determine if a health care worker should enter the facility, facilities should evaluate their residents’ needs, the services needed to meet those needs, and the individuals who provide those services. Facilities should also ensure that the precautions needed to prevent COVID- 19 transmission will be available for any individual that enters the facility (e.g., PPE availability). In other words, there is not a blanket approval for all health care workers to always be allowed to enter. Similarly, CMS has not enacted a blanket ban on any type of health care worker. On a case by case basis, facilities should permit a health care worker to enter by determining if the services they provide are essential to continue, need to be discontinued or postponed, or can be done remotely. Note, due to the risk COVID-19 poses to nursing home residents, we recommend facilities only continue critical services, and only allow individuals who are essential to provide those critical services into the facility.

CMS also encourages the use of telehealth, so residents can be seen virtually by their practitioner. They recently released a nursing home telehealth toolkit that facilities may find helpful.

‍