How we rank, and where the data comes from
CaringAtlas is built from official government data and the communities' own public information, verified, then ranked by the record. This page explains exactly how, so you can trust what you read and check it yourself.
The federal data we use
For nursing homes, home health agencies, and hospices, we ingest the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Provider Data Catalog, the same data behind Medicare Care Compare. On each nursing-home profile we surface the figures the referral sites leave out:
- the CMS overall Five-Star rating, plus the separate health-inspection, staffing, and quality-measure ratings;
- the number of health-inspection deficiencies on the most recent standard survey;
- nurse hours per resident per day, including registered-nurse hours, the single best predictor of care quality;
- federal fines and payment denials, the CMS abuse icon, and special-focus-facility status;
- ownership type and certified-bed count.
Every figure links to that facility's official Medicare record so you can confirm it at the source.
Assisted living, memory care, and independent living
These are licensed by states, not rated by Medicare, so no CMS Five-Star or inspection-deficiency record exists for them. We do not pretend otherwise. We confirm that the community operates and is state-licensed, extract its care levels, room types, amenities, and any published pricing from its own website, and we clearly flag what we could not verify. Where a state publishes assisted-living license and complaint records, we point you to them.
How we verify a community before we publish a profile
A registry-listed provider (CMS-certified) is authoritative on its own. For a community we discover from the open web, we publish a full profile only after it passes every check: its name appears on its own website, an AI classifier confirms it is genuinely a senior care community, a real contact or tour path exists, and it has real third-party reviews showing it actually operates. Communities that do not clear those gates remain searchable and link out to their official record, but they do not get an indexed profile. That boundary is what keeps this directory free of thin, fabricated listings.
How the rankings work
"Best" and "top rated" lists are ordered by the CMS record and by real resident-review volume and rating, computed the same way for every community. No community can pay for its position, and a referral relationship never moves a ranking. We never republish scraped review text; we show an aggregate rating with a link to the source.
How we make money
CaringAtlas is free to families. A community may pay a referral fee when a family moves in through us; it never affects ranking or what we display, and we disclose it wherever it applies. We publish only consumer-facing information and never anyone's private contact details.