Corrections policy

Almost everything on this site is a republished government record. So a correction is one of two different things, and which one it is decides where it has to be fixed: either our rendering of the record is wrong, or the record itself is. We will fix the first and trace the second to its source.

If our rendering is wrong

Wrong facility, wrong figure, a citation attached to the wrong home, a total that does not match the file it came from, a link that goes nowhere — that is ours. Email hello@eldercarelens.com with the page address and what is wrong on it. Messages are read and errors are corrected. This is a small independent project rather than a newsroom, so we do not promise a turnaround we might not be able to keep — we would rather state that plainly than publish a commitment that depends on someone being at a desk.

If a facility disputes what the record says

This is the common case, and it is worth being exact: we cannot amend a federal inspection or penalty record, and we would not want the ability to. If a citation, fine, or rating is wrong, the correction has to happen at the source, and then it reaches this site on the next refresh automatically.

• Nursing home inspection and penalty records come from CMS. The formal route is Independent Dispute Resolution through your state survey agency, which conducted the survey. Where CMS records that a citation is under dispute, we already mark it as disputed on the page.
• Assisted living, memory care, and home care are licensed by states, so the record belongs to the state licensing agency that issued it. Each facility page links to the source it was drawn from.
• Ownership and cost-report figures come from the CMS Provider Data Catalog and the HCRIS cost reports, as filed by the provider.

Tell us anyway. Even where we cannot change the underlying record, we want to know — a dispute we can verify is something we can note, and a pattern of them tells us our reading of a file is wrong. What we will not do is remove an accurate government record because its subject would prefer it were not published.

What we will not do

We do not remove citations, fines, or ratings for payment, and no facility relationship exists that could be leveraged to ask — see how we are funded. We do not quietly change a figure: where a correction changes something material, the page's source and vintage change with it.