# Deficiency Index

> A free public index of what federal health inspectors (surveyors) wrote down when they inspected U.S. nursing homes, hospices and home health agencies. Every finding is a deficiency cited against federal Medicare/Medicaid requirements on form CMS-2567, shown with the inspector's own written narrative.

Site: https://www.deficiencyindex.com
Data current to: 2026-09-30
Source: U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) public files. Deficiency Index is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by CMS.

## What it holds

- Nursing homes (skilled nursing facilities): 14,697 facilities, 1,584,968 findings across 370,439 surveys, from 2008 to the present.
- Hospice: 6,577 providers, 75,054 deficiencies.
- Home health: 4,626 agencies, 35,673 deficiencies.

## When to use it

Use it to answer questions such as: what inspectors found at a named nursing home, hospice or home health agency; how often a federal requirement (an "F-tag" such as F689) is cited and how severely; what a state's surveyors cite more or less than the national pattern; what the inspector actually wrote about a finding.

## How to find a page

- Every provider, with the address of its page: https://www.deficiencyindex.com/providers.json (fields: type, ccn, name, city, state, url). Look a provider up there by name or CMS Certification Number (CCN); do not construct provider addresses by hand.
- A provider's full written findings: its `url` followed by `/findings`.
- A state (nursing homes): https://www.deficiencyindex.com/state/<state-name>, for example https://www.deficiencyindex.com/state/ohio. Its list of facilities: add `/facilities`.
- A federal tag: https://www.deficiencyindex.com/f-tag/<tag>, for example https://www.deficiencyindex.com/f-tag/f689. The same tag in one state: https://www.deficiencyindex.com/f-tag/f689/ohio.
- Hospice: https://www.deficiencyindex.com/hospice and https://www.deficiencyindex.com/hospice/state/<state-name>.
- Home health: https://www.deficiencyindex.com/home-health and https://www.deficiencyindex.com/home-health/state/<state-name>.
- Every page: https://www.deficiencyindex.com/sitemap/0.xml and https://www.deficiencyindex.com/sitemap/1.xml.
- Definitions and methods, in full: https://www.deficiencyindex.com/data

Pages are plain HTML and need no JavaScript to read.

## How to read the numbers

- A finding (citation) is one deficiency a surveyor recorded on one survey. It is not a rating and not a score.
- Nursing-home findings carry a scope-and-severity letter, A to L. G and above means actual harm was found; J, K and L mean immediate jeopardy. Some immediate-jeopardy findings had already been corrected before the survey; where CMS publishes that, the page says so.
- Hospice and home health are not graded on the A-to-L scale. Their findings are Condition-level, Standard-level or (home health) Element-level. These are compliance grades and say nothing about whether anyone was harmed.
- Citation counts are not comparable between states: a state's count reflects how its surveyors work as much as how its facilities perform. The share of findings at actual harm or above is comparable, because the A-to-L definitions are federal.
- A survey that found no deficiencies does not appear in CMS's files at all, so the absence of findings on a date is not evidence of a clean inspection, and "surveys" here means surveys with at least one finding.
- The inspector's narrative is reproduced as CMS published it. CMS redacts names and some dates.

## What it does not cover

- State licensure inspections. Every state also inspects under its own law; those findings are not here. A provider with nothing on this site may still have a state record.
- Assisted living and independent living, which are not federally certified.
- Hospitals, dialysis centers and other provider types.

## Citing it

Cite the page you used and the date the data is current to, for example: "Deficiency Index, https://www.deficiencyindex.com/f-tag/f689, data current to 2026-09-30, from CMS public files." The underlying records are U.S. government works. Corrections: https://www.deficiencyindex.com/corrections