tl;dr: We have launched a new domain (seniorcaredata.com) which will allow us to delve into many other datasets that CMS and others publish.
When we first put together the pages for this site, we wanted to answer one simple question: what did all of this data from CMS mean? We had found that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid were publishing large datasets monthly covering what appeared to be all of the skilled nursing homes in the United States. This was interesting information, but it is hard to understand what is going on simply by pouring through Excel spreadsheets containing tens to hundreds of thousands of records.
Our first insight was to put all of this data together on one page where you easily see all of the data for a specific facility that was currently spread across more than 10 datasets and hundreds of rows. Once we had that, we could start asking other questions and organize the data in many different ways, homes by state, by city, homes by ratings, and on and on. Then by collecting the records from other time periods we could also start to look at what was happening over time.
We have just begun to scratch the surface on the data; we’re finding new and interesting insights daily.
But, it turns out that CMS publishes data for more than just skilled nursing facilities. We’re finding new records regularly. Most recently we found data on doctors and doctors groups. This has proven to be a very interesting data set as it provides some insight into to costs.
After some anguish over what to do, we decided to continue digging into this data but to use a different domain name. Nursinghomedatabase.com seemed like a really good choice when we started but it looks strange for people who want to find out about hospitals, or dialysis centers, other whatever else.
A few months ago, we quietly launched the new domain, seniorcaredata.com.
For those who do not know, changing to a new domain can be a difficult process. Google and other search engines take a long time to index your site and start including your links in their search results. Almost all of our traffic comes not from going to are home page but from clicks related to specific homes or lists. Indexing can therefore become a real issue if your site has more than 200,000 pages! Even now several years have launching this site, Google does not include the majority of our pages in their search results.
Nursinghomedatabase.com has been growing very steadily for the past few years. In June we surpassed 140,000 monthly page views. We certainly do not want to lose this momentum. So, what we are going to do is maintain this site which will be true to its name and focus on the skilled nursing home data. SeniorCareData.com will provide this information too and will extend into all the other datasets that we finding.
