Methodology
Where every line comes from.
Sources
Nursing homes: CMS Provider Information, Survey Summary, Health Deficiencies, Penalties, Ownership, Payroll-Based Journal staffing and MDS quality measures. Home-health agencies: CMS Home Health Care Agencies with the Home Health Compare measures and their national and state files. Hospices: CMS Hospice General Information with the Hospice Provider measures and their national and state files. All refresh on CMS’s monthly cycle. Assisted living: added state by state from each licensing agency, once its severity mapping has been reviewed. Each page lists the dataset and retrieval date for every section under Sources & provenance.
What CMS does not publish
CMS publishes each nursing-home citation’s tag, official description, scope/severity letter and correction date, but not the surveyor’s written findings. Those are in the Statement of Deficiencies (CMS-2567) for that survey, which every survey row links. It does not publish inspection reports for home-health agencies or hospices at all; for those providers the published record is certification, ownership type and quality measures, and the pages say so rather than showing an empty section as though a report were missing.
The three classes
The official severity code always comes first and is never replaced. Beside it we add one of three classes as a reading aid. For CMS nursing-home deficiencies, scope/severity A–C is Paperwork, D–F is Standard and G–L is Harm (actual harm or immediate jeopardy). For Florida assisted living, Class IV is paperwork, Class III is standard and Classes I–II are harm. Every mapping is reviewed by a person before a state becomes indexable; the tables are in the admin’s ingest view. Red appears on this site only for harm-class items, Special Focus status and license actions.
Special Focus Facilities
CMS designates nursing homes with a persistent pattern of serious deficiencies as Special Focus Facilities and publishes a candidate list. We show the designation exactly as published, with its date, and link CMS’s explanation.
Staffing
Hours per resident day and turnover are CMS Payroll-Based Journal figures for the stated quarter, shown beside the state and national figures from the same release. Bars are drawn to a fixed scale so the same value has the same length on every page.
Quality measures
Nursing-home measures are CMS MDS figures for the stated period. Home-health and hospice measures come from those programmes’ own published files. Some measures count something you want to be high and some something you want to be low, so every row states the direction CMS uses. The state and national columns come from the same release as the facility figure, so the three are comparable. We do not compute composites of our own.
Ownership and chains
Owners are reproduced as reported to CMS Provider Enrollment or the state licensure file, with role, interest and date. Where several facilities report the same ultimate parent we group them into a chain page; a merge between differently-spelled entities is published only after a person reviews it. CMS ownership data has known gaps and we say so on every ownership section.
Cost context
County figures come from public cost surveys and are never a facility’s price. Neither CMS nor the states publish facility rates.
Which pages search engines see
A record is listed in our sitemap once it carries published findings — a survey for a nursing home, or published quality measures for a home-health agency or hospice. Records with nothing on file yet stay live, linked and canonical, but are marked noindex, because a page with no findings is not worth a search result. The same applies to a state whose assisted-living severity mapping a person has not yet reviewed.
Empty sections
Where a section is empty we say what window we hold — “no surveys in the records we hold from the agency since the date collection began” — never “never inspected”.
This site is not a consumer reporting agency and its records may not be used to make decisions about employment, credit, insurance or housing. Records are for informational use.