On With Life Long Term Care

The Inspection Grade is a proprietary Assisted Living Magazine grade — a 0–100 score (shown as a letter) of a facility's regulatory inspection record, compared with other CMS-certified facilities in Iowa. It is built from several categories, each carrying a weighted share — ranking better than that group raises the grade, worse lowers it. Serious problems weigh more than clean marks, so one severe issue costs more than a good record earns.

It is not a government rating. CMS and state health agencies publish the underlying inspection records; the grade is our own calculation from them, and no regulator endorses or reviews it.

It can disagree with the CMS Health Inspection rating, which does not factor in enforcement and persistence.

How the score is actually built — the categories, what share of the grade each one carries, the exact measure behind it, and how the pieces combine — is set out in the Methodology panel. This page covers what the grade is, what it is not, and when we decline to publish one.

It covers inspections, and nothing else. This grade reads a facility's regulatory inspection record. It does not measure staffing levels, clinical quality, food, activities, or what residents and families think of the place. A facility with a strong inspection record can still be a poor fit, and a weaker record is a reason to ask questions rather than a verdict.

Not every facility is graded on the same categories. Which categories exist at all depends on what a facility's regulator publishes — fines and problem-resolution data, for instance, are collected only at the federal level, so they are never part of a state-licensed facility's grade. A grade can even rest on a single category when that is the only inspection data on record. It reflects what we can actually verify, and a facility is never marked down for data that does not exist for it. The Methodology panel lists the categories this facility is graded on.

The period we look at. Where a state publishes its own inspection record, the grade follows that record and the period the state reports on. Where we grade from inspection reports we have read ourselves, the grade covers the last five years. CMS-certified nursing homes are graded on the current records CMS publishes. Either way, old findings age out: a facility isn't judged forever on a problem it has long since fixed.

Data quality. We weigh every category by how much verified data we actually have — federal CMS inspection records count fully, a state's own published record counts nearly as much, and reports read by our AI count for less. When a record is thin, we grade more cautiously and won't publish a damaging grade we can't stand behind.

The scale. It's set so a typical facility lands around a B+. Most homes are fine; C, D, or F is a genuine warning flag worth a closer look.

Every measure below is compared against other CMS-certified facilities in Iowa — a facility's position among its peers, not a fixed target. Each category starts at 78, the neutral point, and a measure moves it up or down according to where the facility ranks.

The score that comes out of those measures is turned into a letter on one national scale, built from every CMS-certified facility in the country. The federal inspection record is the same measurement in every state, so a B+ in Iowa means what it means anywhere.

1. Citations 50% of grade
   • All citations, weighted by severity and recency Every citation is scored by how serious it was and how widespread, using CMS's own scale — from 4 points for a minor finding up to 150 for widespread immediate jeopardy. The points are then added up across the last three inspection cycles, with the most recent counted three times as heavily as the two before it, so a recent bad inspection weighs more than an old one. Lower is better. 100% of this category · can add or subtract
2. Enforcement 35% of grade
   • Fines The total federal fines on record. 50% of this category · can only subtract — a clean record here earns nothing
   • Enforcement actions The count of payment denials and other enforcement actions on record. 50% of this category · can only subtract — a clean record here earns nothing
3. Persistence 15% of grade
   • Time to correct a finding The average number of days between a citation and its correction. 100% of this category · can add or subtract

The categories are averaged, each weighted by the share shown above, giving a score out of 100. Those shares assume every category has data behind it: where one is missing — because the regulator publishes nothing for it — that category is left out and the remaining ones take its share, rather than the facility being marked down for the gap. A result above 78 is then pulled back toward it in proportion to how complete the facility's record is, so a high grade cannot rest on thin evidence. A recent serious finding can cap the result regardless of the categories. The number is finally published on a 0–100 scale where a typical facility sits in the 70s and 80s. The measures above compare this facility with CMS-certified facilities in Iowa; the letter itself comes from the national scale described above.