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CMS Care CompareCMS Care Compare
U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services · Tier-2 · profile-enrichment (renders on matched profiles)
CMS Care Compare publishes facility-quality data via the Provider Data Catalog (data.cms.gov/provider-data/). Four cluster families share the CMS Certification Number (CCN) as canonical identifier: Nursing Home Compare, Home Health Compare, Hospice Compare, and Dialysis Facility Compare.
How this source shows up on Fonteum.
The documented research subset includes nursing homes, home health, dialysis, and hospice, plus source-pack work staged for future facility pilots. CMS overall star ratings and component sub-ratings render only on surfaces with the required facility-level data; otherwise the data remains research-only.
What this source does NOT mean
CMS ratings are published by CMS and reflect the measure definitions in the source dataset. Fonteum does not independently rate, inspect, score, endorse, or guarantee any provider.
Research and data questions this source supports.
- Access a single API surface that joins nursing home, home health, hospice, dialysis, and ASC quality data via CCN — no multi-dataset joins required.
- Build a post-acute care network quality dashboard that ranks facility options across all five Care Compare facility types.
- Power a referral management tool that surfaces the highest-rated post-acute options for a patient transitioning from a specific acute care hospital.
- Support M&A diligence on a post-acute portfolio by querying Care Compare quality signals across multiple facility types simultaneously.
- Serve as a foundation for a RAG system that answers questions about specific facility quality using CMS-sourced structured data.
Dataset size: ~50,000+ facilities across all Care Compare types
Per-field display contract.
Fields listed below show their configured `display_allowed` flag from the §94 provenance schema. Fields marked write-locked are captured for audit and are not rendered on profile pages.
Renders on profile
7 fieldsWrite-locked — captured to provenance, not displayed
4 fieldsWhat we can’t infer from this source.
- Each Care Compare cluster has its own measure-set; the overall rating is not directly comparable across clusters.
- Hospice has no CMS overall star rating today; the Hospice General Information dataset publishes provider availability + ownership only.
- State-level aggregates (mean rating, share-of-stars) NEVER attach to individual facility profiles. They render on /research only.
- Special Focus Facility status, fines / payment denials, abuse-icon flags, and individual quality measures are write-locked pending operator copy review — captured to provenance but not surfaced.
- The checked Care Compare serving tables carried a May 7, 2026 source date on July 12. CMS publisher cadence does not prove that a newer Fonteum load completed.
Authority, license, publisher cadence.
Authority
U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
Tier
Tier-2 · profile-enrichment (renders on matched profiles)
Publisher / configured cadence
Declared or configured cadence: Quarterly across most datasets; some monthly. Not evidence of the latest loaded source date.
License
U.S. government public-domain works. Attribution required: 'Source: CMS Care Compare · Last checked {date}'. License ↗
Official URL
Attribution requirement
Source: CMS Care Compare ({Provider Data Catalog dataset name + id}) · Last checked {YYYY-MM-DD}
What the source allows.
U.S. government public-domain works. CMS publishes the Provider Data Catalog at data.cms.gov/provider-data/ with explicit redistribution rights. Attribution must include both the dataset name (e.g. "NH Provider Info", dataset id 4pq5-n9py) and the source date. The checked Care Compare serving tables carried a May 7, 2026 source date on July 12; publisher cadence does not prove a completed load.
What a single field looks like in the graph.
This worked example shows the provenance shape used when a surfaced field has populated source, last-checked, display-rule, and confidence metadata. Individual fields may omit unavailable values.
Field
State-level mean star rating (research-only)
Sample value
3.41 (CA, n=1,184 rated nursing homes)
Provenance line
Source: CMS Care Compare · NH Provider Info (4pq5-n9py) · Snapshot 2026-04-15 · Display rule: research-only — never rendered on individual facility profiles
Official API, bulk download, and Fonteum endpoints.
Official API / download
Fonteum surface
Common questions about CMS Care Compare.
- What is CMS Care Compare and what facility types does it cover?
- CMS Care Compare is the federal database of quality ratings and facility information for Medicare-certified healthcare facilities. It covers nursing homes, home health agencies, hospices, dialysis facilities, ambulatory surgical centers, hospitals, long-term acute care hospitals, and inpatient rehabilitation facilities. Fonteum organizes the Care Compare data into separate source family entries for each facility type, all joined via the CMS Certification Number (CCN) backbone.
- Where does CMS Care Compare data come from?
- CMS Care Compare data comes from multiple federal sources: OASIS assessments (home health), Minimum Data Set (nursing home), Medicare claims, CAHPS surveys (patient experience), and direct facility reporting. Each quality measure within Care Compare has its own data source, reporting period, and lag. Fonteum documents the source, methodology version, and snapshot date for each measure surfaced.
- How does Fonteum use CMS Care Compare data?
- The checked Home Health, Hospice, Dialysis, and ASC production tables had a newest source-release date of May 7, 2026 on July 12. Fonteum surfaces loaded data on the Care Compare modules with source metadata where supplied; no provenance fact currently links deterministically to a signature.
- Can I query Care Compare data across facility types in one request?
- Yes — Fonteum's Facility API endpoint accepts a CCN and returns the joined Care Compare signals across all facility types that share that CCN. The join engine uses the CMS Provider of Services (POS) iQIES file as the CCN identity backbone.
- What is the CCN and why does it matter for Care Compare?
- The CMS Certification Number (CCN) — formerly Medicare Provider Number — is the facility-level identifier that CMS assigns to every Medicare-certified provider. It is the primary key across all Care Compare datasets. Every nursing home, home health agency, hospice, dialysis facility, ASC, and hospital in Care Compare has a CCN. The CMS Provider of Services (POS) file is the master CCN registry.
Where this source already shows up.
Research studies citing this source
Related sources in the graph
- /sources → The generated source-catalog subset — documented datasets Fonteum cites.
- /data-provenance → The provider graph — pipeline diagram, source-family clusters, field-level provenance examples, display rules.
- /methodology → Documented sourcing, publisher cadence, observed freshness, and corrections policy.
- /editorial-policy → Independence, sourcing, conflicts, corrections, retractions.