About Nursing Care Index

Every nursing home certified by Medicare or Medicaid is inspected by its state, rated by CMS, and fined when it fails. All of that is public. It is also spread across four files that change name every month, rated on a five-star scale whose blanks mean six different things, and cited in a code of letters that nobody outside the industry reads. This site puts one facility’s whole record on one page, in words, with what changed this month — and does the same for every county, city, state and chain.

Where the data comes from

• Provider Information — every certified nursing home, its ratings, staffing, ownership type, chain, beds and flags, from the CMS Provider Data Catalog.
• Health Deficiencies — every citation from the current inspection cycles, with the surveyor’s finding in CMS’s words and the severity CMS assigned. Same catalog.
• Penalties — every fine and payment denial since 2023. Same catalog.
• Ownership — every owner, officer and manager CMS lists for each facility. Same catalog.

All four are a work of the US Government and in the public domain. CMS refreshes them monthly, around the first of the month, and every page here says which month it reflects. We add the joining, the counting and the wording; nothing here is estimated, and no page is a recommendation: it is not a recommendation of a facility, and not one against it.

What we do to it

We print a rating as CMS gives it and, where CMS gives none, the reason CMS gives — “did not submit staffing data” is a sentence, and a blank is not. We print a citation’s severity letter with the words CMS attaches to it, so “J” reads as what it is: immediate jeopardy to resident health or safety. We add up the fines CMS lists. We group facilities by the county and chain CMS lists them under. That is the whole of it.

What we leave out

The files carry each facility’s telephone number and street address. We read those columns and discard them at the point the file is parsed; they are not stored and there is no column for them in our database. A facility’s own listing has them, and Medicare.gov’s Care Compare has them.

We do not estimate what a facility costs: private-pay rates are not published anywhere, and a number we made up would be worth less than no number.

Corrections and removals

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it — corrections@nursingcareindex.com. Say which page and what you expected.

The ownership file names the people who own and run each facility, and we republish those names as filed, on that facility’s page and nowhere else. If you are named in the ownership record and want that reconsidered, write to privacy@nursingcareindex.com. We will read it, reply, and explain what we can and cannot do: we cannot alter the inspection record or the ownership record, which are CMS’s, but what this site chooses to republish and how prominently is ours.

Who runs it

Ospan (Nevada, USA), 1285 Baring Blvd #704, Sparks, NV 89434. Not a facility, not a referral service, not an agency, and not affiliated with any of them.