Methodology
How the data is built
Public sources, joined facility by facility, with a source and a date on every fact.
Sources
Facilities and their operators come from federal public records: CMS provider enrollment and certification files (including Nursing Home Care Compare and Medicare enrollment, PECOS), the NPPES National Provider Identifier registry, and the Census Bureau for geography. Nursing home ownership, including owners' percentages and chain affiliations, is as reported to CMS. Hospital and outpatient ownership is checked against SEC filings, IRS Form 990 filings and the companies' own published lists.
How ownership is linked
Each provider is tied to the organization that operates it, and each operator to the organizations above it, up to the ultimate owner. Where several sources disagree, the licensed or Medicare-enrolled operator takes precedence. Links are dated: a page shows when each fact was last confirmed, and changes are kept as history rather than overwritten.
When an owner is published
An ownership link appears on a page only when its evidence meets one of three tests: a public record names it (CMS, an SEC filing, an IRS Form 990, a state filing); the company itself discloses it on its own website or in a press release, and a second, independent kind of source agrees; or our own review of conflicting sources settled it. Trade press or encyclopedias alone are never enough, and a company page or filing that contradicts a link holds it back until it is reviewed. Each published owner lists its sources with links and dates.
Nursing home groups
Nursing home groups are CMS affiliated entities: homes that CMS links because they share owners or managers. Each home is counted once, in the group CMS lists on that home's own Medicare enrollment, and CMS names each group after one of its members. The operator shown on each home's page is the company or body enrolled with Medicare for that home.
We check group sizes against operators' own published counts. In October 2026, 39 of the 55 largest groups with a published count matched within about 15%. Most gaps came from recent acquisitions CMS had not yet recorded, or from counts that include assisted living.
In some states, notably Texas and Indiana, public bodies such as hospital districts and county hospitals hold the licences for many nursing homes and contract with a private company to run them. We tag these groups as public licensees; they are ranked like any other group.
What we will not do
- Guess an owner. If no source names one, the owner is shown as unknown.
- Merge two organizations on a similar name alone. Matches use identifiers, then exact names; anything looser is reviewed by a person.
- Publish data whose terms do not allow it.
Freshness
This edition of the data is dated 2026-10-26. Sources are re-checked on their own release schedules.
Corrections
Every provider page has a "Report a correction" link. You can also contact us directly.