Sources
When you choose care for a parent, the last thing you need is a website's private scoring or a handful of anonymous reviews. Every rating in your report comes from the government's own inspection record. Here is exactly what feeds it.
This is the backbone of the report. Care Compare is the official database run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that certifies and inspects nursing homes. The star ratings, health-inspection results, staffing hours, fines, and abuse flags in your report are Medicare's own figures, drawn from unannounced on-site surveys and payroll records, not from an opinion or an algorithm we invented.
Why that matters to you: this is the same data your doctor, a discharge planner, or a state ombudsman would consult, and the same record regulators use when they inspect. You are not getting our take on these homes. You are getting the federal government's inspection record, gathered into one comparison so you can read across the homes near you in a couple of minutes instead of looking each one up separately.
To find the homes nearest to you, we first need to know where your ZIP sits on a map. Zippopotam is a free public service that converts a US ZIP code into a map location and state. That is all it does here: it tells us where to center the search so we can rank homes by real distance from the person who needs care. It touches nothing about the homes themselves.
What we do not use, on purpose: star ratings we made up, paid placements, referral fees, or reviews from strangers on the internet. No home pays to rank higher, and no home can pay to hide a flag. The report simply organizes Medicare's public record and explains it. Because that record updates quarterly, some figures may lag a recent change at a home, which is one more reason to treat the report as your shortlist and confirm it with a visit.
