About & how we're funded

Who we are

Eldercare Lens is a small independent project, not a company. There is no sales team, no investors, no facility relationships, and nobody here is paid by anyone whose homes appear on this site. It exists because the public record on nursing homes is genuinely good and almost unreadable — it sits in federal files that answer the question a family is actually asking only after somebody joins them together.

We publish without a byline, on purpose — and you should know what that costs you. A name would let you weigh our credentials; you cannot, and we would rather say so than pretend the question does not exist. What we offer instead is the thing a byline is only a proxy for: you never have to take our word for anything. Every figure on every page names its government source and the date we copied it, every facility page links to that home's own record on Medicare Care Compare so you can check us against the government directly, and our methodology states what we compute, how, and what we refuse to estimate. Where our own judgment is involved — the plain-English summaries, the flags — the rule that triggered it is disclosed and the underlying data sits next to it. If a page ever asks you to trust us rather than check us, that is our error, and we want to hear about it.

Eldercare Lens is independent. No nursing home, chain, or referral company pays us to be listed, ranked, hidden, or recommended. We could not remove a facility's citations for money if we wanted to — the data comes straight from the government.

We never sell your information, and we collect nothing personal unless you ask us to. There is no lead form, no 'talk to an advisor' wall, and we never ask for a phone number. You can read every page on this site without giving us anything at all. The only personal information we ever hold is an email address, and only if you choose to create a free account to save your plan or follow a facility for inspection alerts — see our privacy policy. That is a deliberate contrast with commission-based referral services, which are paid a fee — often around a month's rent — by the facility you choose.

How we keep it free: ordinary display advertising, from Google AdSense. That is the whole business model, and it is worth being exact about what it does and does not buy. Google's ads set cookies and can be personalised from your browsing elsewhere — our privacy policy sets out precisely what that means and how to switch personalisation off. What no advertiser can buy is a word of what you read: ads are sold by Google against the page, and no advertiser can alter a rating, a citation, a ranking or a recommendation anywhere on this site. Separately and more importantly, no facility, chain or referral company pays us anything — not to be listed, ranked, hidden, or recommended — and we do not sell your information. We also keep the ads off the pages where they would be worst: there is none in the My Plan planner, and none on the professional, data and reports pages. If the site ever needs revenue beyond ads, it will come from anonymized data tools sold to researchers and professionals — never from anything a facility can pay to influence what you see, and never from selling your information.

Corrections welcome. If a fact here is wrong — or the government record it’s drawn from is wrong — email hello@eldercarelens.com and we’ll fix it or trace it to the source.

Not a government site. Eldercare Lens is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicare, the Department of Veterans Affairs, or any government agency. We reproduce public government records and say where each one came from; we do not speak for the agencies that publish them. For the official record, go to Medicare Care Compare.

This site is informational and is not medical, legal, or placement advice. For personalized help, your Area Agency on Aging and your state’s Long-Term Care Ombudsman are free and unbiased.