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Care quality
Provider performance, patient outcomes, and accreditation — how care is delivered and where it slips.
11 studies on this desk
- Nursing Home Statistics by State 2026: 14,699 CMS Records
The May 7, 2026 CMS Care Compare snapshot contains 14,699 nursing-home facility records across 53 state or territory codes. Of those records, 14,572 carry a CMS overall rating. The page publishes the named source file, digest, machine-readable twins, methodology, and scope limits.
2026-07-21 · 4 min - Who runs the clinical trials: academia, not pharma, 2026
Of the 589,453 studies registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, 71.4% are run by academic and hospital sponsors and only 22.1% by industry — the registry of medical research is led by universities, not pharma. Yet industry runs 41.2% of phased drug-development trials, and 53.8% of all sponsors registered just one study.
2026-06-17 · 9 min - The 1% penalty: which hospitals lose Medicare pay for hospital-acquired conditions, FY2026
In CMS's FY2026 Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program, 719 of 3,055 hospitals — the worst-performing quartile by total HAC score — lose 1% of every Medicare payment for the year. The cut is graded on a curve: most hospitals beat the national infection baseline, yet a fixed quartile is penalized regardless.
2026-06-17 · 9 min - Where clinical trials stop: the Phase 2 valley, 2026
Of the 373,998 clinical trials on ClinicalTrials.gov that have reached a final outcome, 51,959 — about 1 in 7 — ended in discontinuation rather than completion. Attrition is uneven: 23.0% of settled Phase 2 trials stop early, against 14.7% at Phase 1, the signature of the efficacy-stage valley where a candidate must first prove it works.
2026-06-16 · 9 min - The FDA Drug Recall List, Analyzed: 2026 Trends by Severity
Of 56,777 FDA drug and device recalls on file, 5,237 — 9.2%, about one in eleven — carry Class I, the agency's most serious tier, signaling a reasonable probability of serious injury or death. Devices drive 68.9% of recalls; 99.4% are voluntary, company-initiated withdrawals, not FDA-ordered.
2026-06-14 · 11 min - GLP-1 drugs now cost Medicare Part D $24.57 billion a year
GLP-1 drugs cost Medicare Part D $24.57 billion in 2024 — 10.8% of the entire program's drug spending on just 1.3% of its prescriptions. Ozempic alone, at $12.38 billion, is the second-costliest drug in Part D; Mounjaro and Trulicity push the class past $24 billion.
2026-06-12 · 11 min - HAC Reduction Program: 719 Hospitals Penalized in FY2026
719 hospitals — 23.9% of 3,012 eligible — were penalized under the CMS Hospital-Acquired Condition (HAC) Reduction Program in FY2026, losing 1% of every Medicare payment for a full fiscal year. Every penalized hospital is named from official CMS data with reproducible methodology and a state-by-state breakdown.
2026-06-06 · 10 min - Nursing Home Survey Results: How Fast Deficiencies Get Fixed
Across 410,723 corrected CMS nursing home health deficiencies, the mean time from survey to documented correction is 32.4 days — but the harm-level citations, Severity G and above, close faster, in 28.5 days. The more severe the finding, the quicker the fix. Texas and Illinois correct in about two weeks; Washington, D.C. takes nine.
2026-06-04 · 14 min - DaVita vs Fresenius: The Two Chains Running 74% of US Dialysis
DaVita and Fresenius Medical Care together operate 73.7% of the 7,557 Medicare-certified dialysis facilities in the United States. Chain-owned centers average 2.92 CMS stars versus 2.27 for independents — independents are 3.7× more likely to receive a 1-star rating. State-level market concentration, chain rankings, and reproducible SQL from CMS Care Compare.
2026-06-04 · 12 min - How to Check Nursing Home Violations the Star Ratings Miss
A current-production CCN join finds that 1,464 of 5,832 four- and five-star nursing homes (25.10%) had at least one CMS severity-G-or-higher citation in a literal three-year survey window from April 1, 2023 through April 1, 2026. The study links current CMS ratings to federal deficiency records and names the 100 highest-cited facilities.
2026-06-04 · 14 min - Why 14% of skilled nursing facilities had a quality drop in Q1
Across 5,148 SNFs in Q1 2026, the composite quality score declined by an average of 0.06 points — but the decline was not evenly distributed. Facilities that changed ownership in the prior twelve months accounted for a disproportionate share of the slide.
2026-05-12 · 8 min
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