From the public Home Health Compare datasets on data.cms.gov, specifically the HHC_Provider_Info CSV. CMS publishes it under an open license. SleekRank reads the CSV URL directly, so you do not ship the file with your theme. The data refreshes when CMS pushes a new quarter.

CMS refreshes Home Health Compare quarterly, normally in January, April, July, and October. Corrections to individual rows can happen between refreshes. Setting SleekRank's cache_duration to 86400 seconds gives you a daily re-fetch which catches both the scheduled drops and any out-of-cycle corrections.

The CCN (CMS Certification Number) is the stable identifier and survives name changes, ownership transfers, and address corrections. A combined slug like {ccn}-{agency-name-slug} reads better in search results and still anchors on the CCN. SleekRank's slug column can hold the combined form.

Yes. HHCAHPS_summary_star_rating is a separate column from the quality of patient care star rating, and both should appear as distinct badges. The HHCAHPS scores reflect patient survey responses on care, communication, professionalism, and likelihood to recommend, which is different signal from clinical quality measures.

CMS marks rows with no star rating when the survey or claims volume is too low to score. Use a Twig conditional in the template to suppress the badge for those rows and render a "new agency" or "insufficient data" tag instead. Do not invent a rating or default to 3 stars to fill the gap.

CMS asks publishers to cite the dataset and the refresh date. Add a small footer block driven by a meta mapping that prints "Source: CMS Home Health Compare, refreshed [last_refresh_date]". The refresh date is in the dataset metadata, not the row, so map it once at the page-group level.

When CMS drops a CCN from the file, the SleekRank row disappears on the next refresh and the URL returns 404 cleanly. The XML sitemap regenerates automatically without it. If you want the URL to redirect to a parent county or service-area page instead, add a wildcard redirect rule before the row is removed.

Yes. CMS publishes ownership_type as proprietary, non-profit, government, or other. Run a SleekRank page group at /home-health/non-profit/{slug}/ for the non-profit subset, or render ownership as a filterable tag on the main directory archive that links into the per-CCN pages.