I Built Something for the Families Nobody Is Building For

Announcing NursingHomeIQ — a tool that gives families honest, intelligence about nursing home care, along with a wealth of free resources. Here is why it exists, what it does, and what it will never claim to do.

My father lives with me. He has physical challenges from Parkinson's — though even that diagnosis is debated by his doctors, who wonder whether essential tremors might be the more accurate word. The uncertainty itself is its own kind of difficulty. What is not uncertain is the daily reality: the adjustments, the accommodations, the presence this requires from our family.

I am one of the lucky ones — the ones who have the space and the time and the family structure that makes that possible. A lot of families don't have those things. Or they have them right up until the moment they don't, and then they have seventy-two hours to figure out what comes next.

I have spent twenty-four years working with data. I have spent the last several years specifically thinking about how artificial intelligence can be used not just to make organizations more efficient but to make ordinary people more capable — to give them access to the kind of intelligence that used to belong only to professionals, systems, and insiders. That is the thesis of this blog. It is also, increasingly, the organizing principle of the things I build. Bringing dignity and understanding to a world that is changing more rapidly than ever is something everyone should desire.

I have a personal window into this world that most people building data tools don't. My sister is an assistant director of nursing at a care facility. I have watched, through her, what these places look like from the inside — the staffing pressures, the regulatory weight, the daily tension between what good care requires and what a stretched workforce can deliver. She cares deeply about the people in her facility. So do most of the people who do this work. The system around them is the problem, not the people inside it.

When I started looking seriously at the nursing home data landscape, I found exactly the kind of situation that makes this work feel necessary. There is a massive, publicly available dataset — CMS publishes staffing records, inspection histories, complaint data, and quality measures for every certified facility in the country. It is a remarkable public resource. It is also nearly unusable by the families it is designed to serve. The formats are dense, the methodology is opaque, the composite rating obscures more than it reveals, and the system does nothing to contextualize any of it for someone who is standing in a hospital hallway with a seventy-two-hour discharge window and a parent who can no longer live alone. Still — it is better than nothing, and I am genuinely thankful it exists.

The data exists. The people who need it most can't read it. That gap is not a technical problem. It is a dignity problem.

So I built NursingHomeIQ.

What it is

NursingHomeIQ is a consumer resource that synthesizes CMS data, Payroll-Based Journal staffing records, inspection histories, penalty records, and community reviews into a single IQ Score for every certified nursing facility in the United States. It surfaces the signals that matter — turnover rates, agency staffing reliance, weekend-versus-weekday gaps, complaint-driven citation patterns — and presents them in plain language alongside the government's own ratings, so families can see both what the official record says and what the underlying data actually shows. It also provides useful, grounded, easy-to-follow guides and tools to help those on the journey.

The gap between the official record and the underlying data is often significant. A facility can carry a five-star CMS rating while reporting 80% registered nurse turnover, covering nearly half its RN hours with contract agency staff, and generating the majority of its inspection citations from resident and family complaints rather than standard surveys. The star rating shows five stars. The IQ Score shows 68 out of 100. Both numbers are built from the same public data. Only one of them tells you what you need to know before you decide.

Beyond the score, the site includes a practical guide series — how to read an inspection report, how to interpret staffing data, what to look for on a site visit, how to be an effective advocate after placement. A Wall of Voices surfaces real family and resident experiences from Google reviews, synthesized and organized so the patterns are visible alongside the individual stories. A monthly State of Care report tracks national data movements, regulatory developments, and facilities whose trajectories have shifted in ways families should know about.

NursingHomeIQ is

• A consumer intelligence tool
• Built on publicly available government data
• Designed to help families make more informed decisions
• Transparent about methodology and limitations
• An educational resource for families navigating placement
• Independent — no facility pays for placement or ratings

NursingHomeIQ is not

• A placement service or referral agency
• A substitute for a site visit and your own judgment
• A source of medical or legal advice
• A verdict on any individual facility
• Affiliated with or compensated by any facility operator
• A guarantee of care quality

Why it matters

Long-term care in America is one of the most consequential and least navigable systems ordinary people encounter. It involves real money, real legal complexity, real clinical stakes, and — at its center — a human being whose remaining time and dignity are directly shaped by where they land. The families making these decisions are almost never healthcare professionals. They are adult children, spouses, and siblings doing something they have never done before, under time pressure, often while managing their own grief about what the decision means.

The industry has consolidated significantly over the past two decades. Private equity ownership is common. Staff turnover is high — nationally, the average certified nursing assistant turns over at a rate exceeding 50% per year. The federal regulatory floor that would have required minimum staffing levels was repealed in February 2026, a month before this site launched. The system, in other words, is less protected than it was and no more navigable than it has ever been.

Into that environment, most families bring a Google search, a hospital social worker who has fifteen minutes, and a star rating they do not know how to read.

I am trying to price the detailed reports as low as I can — enough to cover costs without creating a burden on families who are already under financial pressure. And I mean this plainly: anyone who needs this information but cannot afford it can contact me directly. I will do what I can to help. The mission is not the revenue. The mission is the families.

Why this fits here

Between Silicon and Soul has always been about one thing: what happens when the tools we build know the difference between data and a person. Every project I have written about here, every system I have built, comes back to that question. Not whether the technology is impressive — it often is — but whether it is pointed at something that matters. Whether it serves the human being on the other side of the screen rather than simply the organization that deployed it.

NursingHomeIQ is that question applied to a population that has every reason to expect a better answer than a five-star composite. The residents of these facilities were engineers, teachers, farmers, and parents. They built things, raised people, held grief, and survived loss. They have stories that predate their diagnoses by decades. They deserve to have someone watching the numbers on their behalf — and to have the people who love them equipped to understand what those numbers mean.

That is what I am trying to build. Not a perfect system — there is no such thing — but an honest one. One that says plainly what the data shows, admits what it cannot see, and treats every family using it as someone who deserves a clear answer to a hard question.

NursingHomeIQ is live at nursinghomeiq.com. The first search is free, no account required. The guide library is free in full. If you find it useful, share it with someone who is navigating this — that is the most meaningful thing you can do.

And if you have a story — a facility that changed your life, a caregiver who deserves to be named, a family in the middle of something hard right now — the Wall of Voices is there for exactly that. Every voice matters. Including yours.