API & MCP access

Programmatic and assistant-ready access to the same CMS-derived skilled nursing and ownership data published on this site.

CMS releases a great deal of nursing home information every month, typically as large data tables and files. That format is complete for analysts who can join files, interpret codes, and repeat the work each refresh—but it is not very approachable for most people, and it is a poor fit for AI assistants that need reliable, structured answers.

NursingHomeDatabase.com does not replace CMS; we curate and operationalize what they publish. The website gives families and researchers search, context, and plain-language presentation. This page describes machine-facing access—the same underlying facts through a documented REST API and an MCP server so integrations and agents can call bounded tools instead of scraping pages or guessing at raw extracts.

REST API (v1)

Use JSON over HTTPS to search facilities, load detail and ownership, and browse owners. Responses are designed to include canonical links back to public pages on this site.

Base URL:

https://www.nursinghomedatabase.com/api/v1/nh

• GET capabilities — supported paths, filters, and defaults
• GET data-freshness — dataset freshness and row counts
• GET facilities — search and list by state, city, zip, name text, ratings, or distance from a free-form address
• GET facilities/{id} — one facility by provider number or web slug
• GET facilities/{id}/ownership — ownership for a facility
• GET owners — search owners by name
• GET owners/{web_owner} — one owner portfolio

List endpoints accept limit (max 100 by default configuration) and offset for pagination.

Facility search also accepts a free-form address with optional radius_miles (defaults to 25) and sort=distance to rank nearest results first.

MCP server

MCP is a standard way for AI clients to discover and call tools with structured inputs and outputs. Our MCP endpoint speaks JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTP POST and exposes tools for facility search, detail, ownership, and owner lookup—so assistants retrieve authoritative rows from our API layer rather than inferring joins from undocumented CSV layouts.

Endpoint:

https://mcp.nursinghomedatabase.com/mcp

A GET request to the same URL returns a short JSON discovery document describing the server name and transport. Send JSON-RPC 2.0 POST requests for initialize, tools/list, and tools/call as defined by your MCP client.