PlainNursing publishes a quality profile for every Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing home that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services tracks — built entirely from official CMS Nursing Home Compare data. This page explains how those pages are produced, what standards they are held to, and how to report a number that looks wrong so we can fix it at the source.

How these pages are produced

Every star rating, nurse-staffing figure, health-inspection deficiency, quality measure, and penalty amount on PlainNursing originates in an official CMS dataset. We download the raw provider-data files, load them through a documented, version-controlled data pipeline, and render them into facility, state, ranking, and guide pages using shared templates. No facility page is hand-written, and no rating, staffing hour, or fine is typed in by an editor. Each figure you see is read directly from the official CMS source record at build time.

Our editorial team is responsible for the parts a pipeline cannot decide on its own: which datasets to use, how each measure is defined and labeled, what the methodology says, how derived measures (such as a state average or a facility-versus-national comparison) are computed, which guides and explainers we write, and what we will not publish. The pipeline then applies those decisions uniformly across every nursing home, so the rule that governs one page governs all of them.

Sourcing standards

We publish only data that comes from official government sources, and we name the source on every page. Our data is:

• CMS Nursing Home Compare: the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Five-Star Quality Rating program — overall, health-inspection, staffing, and quality-measure star ratings; reported nurse-staffing hours per resident day and turnover; health-survey deficiency citations with their scope-and-severity grade; Special Focus Facility status; and Civil Money Penalty (fine) records — published through the CMS Provider Data Catalog. It is the source for every rating, staffing figure, deficiency, and penalty on the site.

We do not scrape third-party review sites, we do not republish self-reported or family ratings as our own, and we do not assign our own quality or safety scores on top of the government data. Where a figure is derived from the official data (for example, a state average or a facility-versus-national comparison), the page links to our methodology, which sets out exactly how it is calculated.

Accuracy and validation

Because the numbers are read straight from CMS files, the most common limitation is the underlying data itself rather than a transcription error. Star ratings are force-curved within each state and depend on a facility reporting enough measures to qualify; staffing is drawn from payroll-based journal data; and deficiency citations reflect the most recent survey window. Our pipeline applies systematic checks before a value is published: it counts only ratings the source actually assigned (never treating an unrated facility as a zero), shows a value as unavailable when the source omits it, and reconciles facility, state, and national rollups so the same figure is consistent wherever it appears.

When we find that a displayed number is wrong, we fix the cause, not the symptom. We trace the value back to the data layer, correct the derivation or labeling rule there, and regenerate the affected pages, so the same class of error is resolved everywhere at once rather than patched on a single page.

Editorial independence

PlainNursing does not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from any nursing home, operator, or chain in exchange for how a facility is presented. We do not assign our own ratings or endorsements. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense. Advertisers have no influence over which facilities we cover, how a rating, staffing figure, or penalty is reported, or how any page ranks.

Update schedule

CMS refreshes Nursing Home Compare data on a monthly basis. We refresh our database from the latest official export and re-stamp the affected pages so the published date reflects when the data genuinely changed. Because measures such as staffing and quality are pooled over multiple collection periods by the source, the figures on a page reflect the reporting window CMS used in its most recent release.

Corrections process

If a figure looks wrong, please tell us. We treat data-error reports as a priority and follow the same process every time:

1. Report. Email hello@plainnursing.com with the page URL and the figure you are questioning.
2. Verify. We check the value against the official CMS source record for that facility or state.
3. Fix at the source. If the figure is wrong on our side, we correct the underlying data or derivation rule and regenerate every page it affects.
4. Note it. If the figure is correct but reflects a known limitation — an unrated facility, a low staffing-reporting period, or a pooled multi-quarter measure — we explain the caveat rather than silently changing it.

Some apparent errors trace back to the CMS record itself. When that is the case, we will tell you so and, where possible, point you to the official Medicare Care Compare tool so you can verify it directly.

Contact

Questions about our standards, methodology, or a specific figure are welcome at hello@plainnursing.com. For more on what the data covers and how it is processed, see our About page and methodology. For how to use this information responsibly when choosing or assessing a nursing home, see our disclaimer.