How HomeTruth works

HomeTruth takes no money from facilities. The services most families lean on — the "free" placement advisors — are paid by the facilities they recommend, per resident moved in. That conflict is exactly what we exist to correct. We are paid by families and by researchers who license our data. Never by an operator, never per placement, never to take a listing down.

Nothing here is our opinion of a facility. Each fact is labeled:

• verified A government record. We link to it so you can read the original — the inspection, the penalty, the ownership filing.
• reported Something families told us — most often what they actually pay. We show how many reports stand behind a number, never a vague "starting at."
• modeled Something we inferred (for example, projecting a trend). We show the method, and we never dress a model up as a fact.

Today HomeTruth covers New York. The public records behind it:

• NYSDOH — adult-care-facility inspections and citations, enforcement actions, and occupancy, from the New York State Department of Health.
• CMS — nursing-home inspections, health deficiencies, penalties, ownership, and Care Compare ratings, from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

State inspection records roll off the government's own site after a few years. We snapshot them daily, so the history stays readable here even after it disappears upstream.

A clean record is not a promise, and a citation is not the whole story — a facility can fix a problem the week after it's found. We show dates, severity, and correction status so you can judge for yourself, and we link the original record every time. Some details a family needs most (the narrative behind an enforcement order, the real monthly price) aren't published by the state at all; we obtain those through public-records requests and from families, and we label them accordingly. If something here is wrong, tell us and we'll correct it against the record.

HomeTruth is an independent project and is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any government agency. It does not provide legal, medical, or financial advice. The New York State Department of Health makes no representation, warranty or guarantee relating to the data or analyses derived from these data.