CMS publishes the Provider Data Catalog with monthly refreshes for Nursing Home Compare. The catalog includes overall and component ratings, survey results, deficiency citations, staffing hours, and ownership data. Most SleekRank setups consume the JSON endpoint directly from data.cms.gov, with a monthly import schedule matching the federal refresh cadence.

CMS refreshes the Nursing Home Compare dataset monthly. Star ratings update quarterly because they depend on the rolling three-year survey window. Staffing data updates monthly based on PBJ (Payroll-Based Journal) submissions. Most SleekRank setups configure a 30-day cache with a monthly bulk import so each refresh cycle propagates within one cache window of the CMS drop.

Use facility-name plus state abbreviation. Nursing home names collide less than restaurants or daycares (chain names are less common), but state disambiguation is still important. Some setups append the CMS certification number (CCN) as a stable suffix when name-state combinations are ambiguous, since the CCN is the canonical CMS identifier.

CMS exposes four rating axes: overall, health inspections, staffing, and quality measures. Each is a 1-5 integer (with 1 the lowest). Render all four as separate badges on each page so families see the breakdown rather than just the overall score. Some component ratings are 'Not Available' for newer facilities, which the template should handle gracefully without breaking layout.

CMS exposes deficiency citations with F-tags (federal tag numbers) and severity codes (A through L). The full survey reports (Form 2567) are not always public but can be requested from CMS. Render the deficiency list with F-tags and severity on each page, and link to the CMS facility-detail URL where the survey summary is published in the federal system.

CMS designates the worst-performing facilities as Special Focus Facilities (SFF), with quarterly progress reviews. SFF candidates are the next tier of concern. Add an sff_status field to surface this flag prominently on relevant pages. Families and discharge planners use the SFF designation as a primary filter when narrowing options on the CMS data layer.

A Place for Mom and Caring.com run lead-generation directories with their own listing pages but rarely surface the full CMS rating breakdown. SleekRank gives the operator a dedicated page per facility with the entire CMS dataset rendered, which ranks for the long-tail facility-name plus rating queries that families run during their actual decision-making research.

SleekRank stores each resolved row in wp_sleek_rank_items at roughly 30-80 KB per facility depending on deficiency-history depth. Fifteen thousand rows is a 500 MB to 1.2 GB MySQL footprint, comfortable on a standard production server. Most teams pair the corpus with edge HTML caching for instant page loads during family research sessions.