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Methodology and Sources

Everything here is derived from free, public CMS files. This page exists so you can check our work, and so you can go get the raw data yourself if you would rather.

Where the Data Comes From

Dataset	File	CMS published	Source
Home Health Agency Enrollments	HHA_Enrollments_2026.07.17.csv	2026-07-27	Download
Home Health Agency All Owners	HHA_All_Owners_2026.07.17.csv	2026-08-19	Download
Hospice Enrollments	Hospice_Enrollments_2026.07.17.csv	2026-07-27	Download
Hospice All Owners	Hospice_All_Owners_2026.07.17.csv	2026-08-19	Download
Skilled Nursing Facility Change of Ownership	SNF_CHOW_2026.07.17.csv	2026-07-27	Download
Skilled Nursing Facility Change of Ownership - Owner Information	SNF_CHOW_Owners_2026.07.17.csv	2026-07-27	Download
Skilled Nursing Facility Enrollments	SNF_Enrollments_2026.07.31.csv	2026-08-17	Download
Skilled Nursing Facility All Owners	SNF_All_Owners_2026.07.31.csv	2026-08-17	Download

All files are published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services under usa.gov/government-works — United States Government works, public domain. We re-resolve the current file from the CMS catalogue on every run rather than hardcoding a URL, because CMS rotates the dated filename each release.

What We Add

CMS publishes owners as separate legal entities with no key linking them. One operator routinely appears as a dozen companies — a property entity, an operating entity, a management company, a therapy company. Nothing in the file says they are the same business.

We group entities into a corporate family when multiple structural signals independently support the grouping. WhoOwnsCare evaluates portfolio overlap, ownership relationships, governance evidence, entity roles, facility associations and other structural signals to determine whether separately filed entities belong to the same corporate family; the specific production thresholds are proprietary. Multiple safeguards prevent lenders, trustees and passive entities from being incorrectly classified as operators. Entities appearing only as lenders, mortgage holders or trustees are excluded from family grouping — a bank holding paper on sixty buildings does not operate them.

Corporate families are our analysis, not a CMS designation. Where we are wrong, tell us and we will fix it.

What We Deliberately Do Not Publish

• We do not build pages about individually named owners. Individuals are counted, never named.
• We do not name personal ownership vehicles — family trusts, living trusts and estate entities carrying a person's name. CMS files these as organisations, but they identify a natural person, so they are counted toward totals and never given a page, a URL or a purchase link. 785 such entities are currently suppressed.
• We do not paywall anything behind a person's name.
• We do not characterise operators. We report what was filed and when.
• We do not attempt to reconstruct any figure CMS has suppressed.

Limits You Should Know About

• Ownership is self-reported by the enrolling provider. CMS does not verify it, and neither do we.
• The private-equity and REIT flags are checkboxes on the enrolment form. Academic work has found the PE flag substantially under-reports true PE ownership held through intermediate holding companies.
• The change-of-ownership file lags. Recent quarters are incomplete and fill in over time.
• Facility counts reflect Medicare enrolment, which is not identical to state licensure.

Operating Families, CMS Affiliation and Legal Parents Are Different Things

Operating family: the group of CMS-enrolled entities that WhoOwnsCare resolves as operating together, using provider-specific rules (nursing homes, home health and hospice each have their own resolver because the CMS evidence differs). CMS affiliation entity: a field CMS publishes only for nursing homes; it is strong evidence but is recorded as its own relationship and never overrides the family. Legal corporate parent: taken only from authoritative filings (SEC Exhibit 21, IRS Form 990) and shown with its source and identifier; a legal subsidiary relationship does not redefine the operating family. Lenders, trustees and property owners are never operators.

Cost Reports and Reporting Periods

Financial metrics come from HCRIS cost reports through a metric registry in which every metric is mapped per form version and transmittal (52 publication-grade metrics across CMS-2540-10, CMS-2540-24, CMS-1728-20 and CMS-1984-14). The unit of analysis is the exact reporting period (provider, period begin, period end). Short periods are kept as reported and never annualised. Worksheet totals whose scope changed between form versions are never compared across versions.

Attributing History to the Operator in Control

Each period is classified against recorded CMS changes of ownership: stable under one owner, before a change, after a change, straddling a change, or unresolved. Family figures use only periods attributed to the family in control at the time; straddling periods are never attributed to either party. For home health and hospice there is no public change-of-ownership dataset, and most owner records carry no association date, so attribution coverage is materially lower and is always disclosed.

Changes of Ownership and Acquisition Activity

Ownership activity counts recorded CMS changes of ownership for skilled nursing facilities only. Openings, closures and rebrands are not derivable from that source and are not inferred. Pre/post comparisons are made only where adequate full-year windows exist on both sides of a transfer, and are described as temporal associations, never as causes.

Distress 2.0

Each scored facility carries six documented components (financial result, occupancy, staffing, health deficiencies, civil money penalties and reporting instability) with fixed weights. Public pages show the band and its drivers; facilities with fewer than two of three core signals are reported as insufficient data rather than scored. In the current release 10,345 of 16,019 facilities are suppressed for coverage.

Coverage Labels

Wherever a figure covers only part of a portfolio it is stated as a share of eligible facilities and labelled High (80% or more), Moderate (50 to 79%), Limited (below 50%) or Unresolved. Portfolio aggregates are suppressed below 50% coverage.

Update Frequency

CMS ownership, enrollment and change-of-ownership files are refreshed monthly; HCRIS quarterly; Care Compare and staffing snapshots quarterly. Current vintages: CMS enrollment 2026-07-31 (nursing homes) and 2026-07-17 (home health, hospice), CMS CHOW 2026-07-17, HCRIS 2026-07-14. Every page shows the vintages it was built from.

Known Limits of the Federal Source Data

CMS ownership records are self-reported by the enrolling provider, and their completeness has been examined publicly. In GAO-23-106163 the Government Accountability Office found that many nursing homes did not have all of their owners listed in CMS's data, that those data were not designed to identify private equity ownership and do not readily do so, and that there is no single authoritative source of comprehensive nursing home ownership information.

WhoOwnsCare resolves what the filings contain. It cannot supply an owner an enrollee did not disclose, and an absence in these pages is not evidence that no such owner exists. Where resolution is uncertain it is labelled rather than asserted, and any record can be disputed under section 6 of the Terms of Use.

Corrections

Email corrections@whoownscare.com with the facility name and CCN. We acknowledge within two business days and complete review within thirty days, as set out in section 6 of the Terms of Use. We log every request and publish the corrected page with an updated date. Where the dispute is with what CMS holds, we will point you at the CMS record and the process for amending it.