Where does Grand Rapids Senior Advisor get its facility data?
Only from official bulk records: Michigan LARA's statewide adult foster care and homes for the aged file and each home's LARA report index and reports, and CMS's Provider Data Catalog for nursing homes, hospices and home health agencies. Current data is as of October 30, 2026.
We never use a facility's own website, an aggregator listing or a review site as a source for license, capacity, inspection or rating data. Each listing page states its source and date, and each profile links to the original record.
How do you handle costs and program figures?
Every dollar figure traces to a primary source -- CareScout's published Michigan medians, MDHHS's eligibility manual, the VA rate tables -- and carries a 'Last verified' date. Where no source exists we say so.
Two examples: CareScout publishes no memory care median, so we publish none; and we use Michigan statewide medians rather than a Grand Rapids figure we cannot trace. Program rules -- MI Choice regions, PACE ZIP codes -- come from MDHHS's own pages.
How do you decide which homes get their own page?
A home gets a profile page when its public record is detailed enough to say something specific -- inspection results, investigation findings, licensee history. Every other licensed home still appears in the directory tables.
We apply the same test to city and neighborhood pages: if the records do not support a useful page, the town is covered on its county page instead. We would rather publish fewer pages than thin ones.
How do we correct mistakes?
Tell us. If a fact is wrong, or a home's status has changed since our last data pull, email us and we will check the source and correct the page, updating its date.
How do you decide what counts as a primary source?
A primary source is the agency or survey that produced the fact: LARA for licenses, CMS for nursing home ratings, MDHHS for Medicaid rules, the VA for pension rates, CareScout for cost medians, the Michigan Legislature for statutes.
News stories and aggregators can point us to a fact; they are never the citation.
How often is the data refreshed?
The facility data is refreshed from LARA and CMS on a regular schedule and every page shows the date of the data it uses; cost and program figures are re-verified when the source publishes new numbers, typically each January and December.
Blog guides keep their original publish date and show an updated date when we revise them.
