CMS Care Compareis Medicare’s official tool for comparing the quality of certified healthcare facilities. It covers nursing homes, home health, hospice, dialysis, ambulatory surgical centers, and hospitals — 14,699 nursing homes alone — each with star ratings and inspection data drawn from CMS’s own records.
What Care Compare is
Care Compare is the consumer-facing front end for the regulatory data CMS already collects when it certifies and inspects healthcare facilities. Instead of leaving that data buried in agency files, CMS turns it into side-by-side comparisons: how a facility scores on inspections, how it staffs, and how its patient outcomes look against peers.
It replaced a set of older, separate “Compare” sites (Nursing Home Compare, Hospital Compare, and others), unifying them under one banner so the public has a single place to look up certified providers.
The facility types it covers
14,699 certified facilities — ratings, staffing, inspections, ownership.
12,392 certified agencies — quality of patient care and services offered.
6,943 certified hospices — ownership and CAHPS quality measures.
7,557 ESRD facilities — five-star ratings and chain ownership.
5,611 ASCs — the ASC quality measures for same-day surgery.
Hospitals, long-term acute care, and inpatient rehab — all under one comparison hub.
How the star ratings work
For several facility types, CMS rolls dozens of underlying measures into a single overall rating from one to five stars. For nursing homes, that blends health-inspection results, staffing, and quality measures; for dialysis and home health, it blends the relevant clinical outcomes. The star is a useful summary, but the underlying measures — inspection deficiencies, staffing hours, outcome rates — are what tell the real story, which is why Fonteum surfaces them, not just the headline number.
How Fonteum mirrors Care Compare
Fonteum builds on the same open CMS datasets but wraps every figure in provenance: the source dataset, the snapshot date, and a link back to the federal file. Facilities can be cross-referenced against the OIG exclusion list and the rest of the federal provider graph by NPI and CMS Certification Number. The result is a traceable, comparable view across facility types — each number you can follow to its origin.
Care Compare facility types by the numbers
Frequently asked questions
- What is CMS Care Compare?
- CMS Care Compare is the official tool the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services publishes so the public can compare the quality of Medicare-certified healthcare facilities and providers. It consolidates inspection results, star ratings, staffing, and outcome measures for each facility into a single comparison, drawn from CMS's own regulatory data.
- What facility types does Care Compare cover?
- Care Compare spans the main Medicare-certified facility types, including nursing homes (14,699), home health agencies (12,392), hospices (6,943), dialysis facilities (7,557), ambulatory surgical centers (5,611), and hospitals, plus long-term and inpatient-rehab facilities.
- What is the CMS star rating?
- For several facility types, CMS condenses many underlying measures into an overall star rating from one to five, where five is best. The rating blends inputs like health-inspection results, staffing, and quality measures so the public has a single, comparable summary — though the underlying measures matter more than the headline star.
- Is Care Compare data free and public?
- Yes. CMS publishes the underlying Care Compare datasets as open government data, refreshed regularly. That is why independent platforms can mirror and analyze it. Fonteum republishes it with each field traced to its CMS source and snapshot date.
- How often is Care Compare updated?
- CMS refreshes the Care Compare datasets on a recurring schedule — many monthly or quarterly — as new inspections and quality data come in. Each Fonteum facility page carries the snapshot date of the CMS file it was built from, so you always know how current the figure is.
- How is Fonteum's Care Compare different from Medicare's?
- Fonteum draws on the same CMS source data but adds provenance: every figure carries its source, dataset, and snapshot date, and facilities can be cross-referenced against the OIG exclusion list and other federal sources. The goal is a traceable, comparable view across facility types, not a marketing surface.
Related
- Compare every US care facility — the hub for all Care Compare facility types.
- CMS Care Compare glossary entry — the short definition and where it fits in the data graph.
- Star rating glossary entry — how the one-to-five summary is built.
- What is an ambulatory surgical center? — one of the facility types Care Compare measures.
- What is dialysis & ESRD? — the ESRD facilities Care Compare rates on five stars.
- What is a Special Focus Facility? — the enforcement flag layered on the nursing-home data.