Questions, answered plainly.

Care Compare gives you current ratings, one facility at a time. We work out figures it does not publish, starting with a single live-discharge rate and the denominator underneath it. We also roll facilities up by owner or by state, add the ownership and change-of-control history and the full inspection record, and show you movement across releases. And we give you enough detail to rebuild every number from the source files yourself.

Three. A single-facility report covers one hospice by its CCN in full detail. An operator report (also called a chain report) rolls up every facility under one owner. A state report rolls up every hospice operating in a state. All three are computed using the same CMS sources and the same derived measures; what differs is scope.

A single-facility report profiles one hospice. An operator report (also called a chain or portfolio report) rolls up every facility under one owner and shows the group two ways, a size-weighted rate and a facility median, so a few very large or very small locations do not distort the picture. A state report does the same across every hospice in a state and lists the operators of record there. Both are summarized across many facilities, so they are less granular per individual facility than a single-facility report; if you then need the full detail on one facility, a drill-down single-facility report is available. Ownership comes from the CMS owner files.

Full figures are on the pricing page. In plain terms, the single-facility report is a fixed price; expedited delivery of that same report costs more for the speed, not for any legal help. Operator and state reports scale with the number of facilities covered, and a refresh re-runs a report you already have at a fraction of its original price. After the purchase of an operator or state report, a single-facility drill-down on one facility of interest is offered at about three-quarters of the standalone single-facility price.

Contact us with the facility, operator, or state. For matters connected to an active audit or litigation, we contract with licensed counsel.

Only public U.S. federal sources: the CMS Provider Data Catalog (hospice provider, national and state files, and the ZIP service-area file), CMS Hospice All Owners, Enrollments and the change-of-ownership files, the QCOR Form 2567 survey export, and the CAHPS Hospice Survey. The About page lists what each one is used for. Reports are reproducible from these files, and each report ends with a manifest naming every source family, its exact release date and a checksum.

No. A report is a data compilation. It presents public metrics with denominators and caveats. It makes no causal claim and is not a determination of wrongdoing. What the data means for a legal matter is for a licensed attorney to decide.

It is a data compilation. It is not legal advice and it is not expert testimony. What it is built for is reproducibility, so your own expert can check it. For anything tied to an active audit or litigation, we work through licensed counsel.

No, and the build will not let them be. The analytical body of a report depends on the CMS releases it cites and on nothing else. Who ordered it makes no difference. What they were hoping to find makes no difference. The cover page names who the report was prepared for; every figure behind it comes out identical either way, and a test fails the build the day that stops being true. A report that changed with the buyer would not hold up under cross-examination, so the build simply does not allow it.

CMS publishes discharge-pattern components but not a single facility live-discharge rate. We derive one from the published counts. It is labeled as computed, and it carries its denominator and its scope. We report both the volume-weighted national rate and the facility-level median, and we label which is which.

When CMS withholds a value (often for small counts), we show it as suppressed and keep its footnote. We never treat a suppressed value as zero. Our backend database enforces this.

Roughly one in eight facilities has no ownership record we can reach. We could show you a blank, or a clean-looking "no owner", but that would be false. Instead, those fields are marked provisional until we match them by hand. The share moves with each quarterly ownership refresh; the methodology page carries the current figure and how it is measured.

Every figure traces to a public CMS file. Before anything ships, the whole dataset is rebuilt from those files and re-checked against known values. Each report lists the exact releases it drew on, so you or your expert can regenerate it and confirm the numbers without involving us.

We load every public CMS release as it comes out. CMS refreshes the provider data several times a year, the ownership files quarterly, and the survey data on its own schedule. Every report stamps the exact release dates it used, so you always know how current a given figure is.

Several years. The provider files and the quarterly ownership snapshots let us show a hospice over time, not just today, and reconstruct changes of control across that window.

We publish them, in detail, on the methodology page, including the ones that are permanent and will never be closed. The most important: the live-discharge rate cannot be externally reconciled against any public CMS file, because no public file reports provider-level discharge status.

We do not, and cost has nothing to do with it. Our reports answer a narrow question for lawyers who already have a matter open, and they are built to make no recommendation at all. That makes them a poor place to start when you are deciding about someone's care. So we published the method instead. For Families shows you where the same federal data lives, what each number does and does not mean, the questions worth asking any hospice, and every free route for raising a concern. It costs nothing and there is nothing to buy.