CMS Care Compare vs Healthgrades: Side-by-Side Comparison
CMS Care Compare is the federal government's official quality-ratings tool for Medicare-certified healthcare facilities — nursing homes, home health agencies, hospitals, and more. Healthgrades is a consumer doctor-and-facility rating platform built on patient reviews. The two reach different data about quality from entirely different methodological origins.
CMS Care Compare vs Healthgrades, across 8 dimensions
| Dimension | CMS Care Compare | Healthgrades |
|---|---|---|
| Data type | CMS-published facility quality ratings — star ratings from inspections, staffing data, and outcome measures | Patient reviews and ratings + provider/facility self-submitted profiles |
| Coverage | ~50,000+ Medicare-certified facilities across all Care Compare modules | ~3 million+ provider profiles; some facility listings |
| Refresh cadence | Quarterly CMS publish; Fonteum re-ingests each quarter | — (not publicly disclosed) |
| License / Cost | U.S. government public-domain works — free to redistribute with attribution | Free for consumers; B2B advertising model |
| API access | data.cms.gov API and bulk CSV downloads; no key required | No public API |
| Source provenance | CCN-keyed rows with snapshot date; SHA-256 digest on each ingestion run | Patient-submitted reviews; state licensing data; field-level provenance not publicly documented |
| Primary use case | Facility quality benchmarking, inspection history, staffing and outcome comparison across Medicare-certified settings | Patient discovery, doctor reviews, consumer comparison of providers |
| Pricing | Free (federal public domain) | Free for patients; provider packages — pricing not public |
Cells marked "—" indicate values not publicly documented by the respective platform. No data has been estimated or fabricated.
Which platform fits your team
When to use CMS Care Compare
Use CMS Care Compare when the work requires federally sourced, methodology-published facility quality data — nursing home star ratings, home health agency outcomes, inspection histories, and staffing levels. It is the primary source for any defensible quality benchmark on Medicare-certified facilities.
When to use Healthgrades
Use Healthgrades when the audience is patients comparing physicians and the signal of interest is peer review sentiment and insurance network compatibility — not inspection histories or CMS-computed quality scores.
Common questions
- Which is more reliable for nursing home quality — CMS Care Compare or Healthgrades?
- CMS Care Compare is the authoritative federal source for nursing home quality data. Ratings are computed from standardized inspection reports, staffing levels, and CMS-defined outcome measures collected by trained inspectors and cross-checked annually. Healthgrades nursing home listings primarily rely on consumer reviews, which are self-selected and not standardized by regulatory inspection.
- Is CMS Care Compare data free to use?
- Yes. CMS Care Compare data is published by the federal government as a public-domain work (17 U.S.C. § 105). Bulk downloads are available at data.cms.gov with no registration or fee. Fonteum ingests Care Compare quarterly and cross-resolves it against the CCN and NPI identity backbone.
- Do Healthgrades hospital ratings use CMS data?
- Healthgrades incorporates some federal data (including CMS hospital quality measures) into its hospital ratings, but its overall scoring methodology is proprietary. CMS Care Compare's hospital quality data is published separately at medicare.gov/care-compare with full methodology disclosure.
- What are the star ratings on CMS Care Compare based on?
- Star ratings vary by care setting. Nursing home ratings use three components: health inspections (weighted most heavily), staffing levels, and quality measures. Home health ratings use quality-of-patient-care measures derived from OASIS assessments. CMS publishes the full methodology for each rating type alongside the data at data.cms.gov.
Last updated 2026-05-31. See all comparisons at /compare →
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