How these records are built

What this site is

SeniorLivingFacts is a public-record research tool for assisted living and other senior care settings. It makes official licensing and inspection records easier to find, compare, and read, without turning those records into a score, endorsement, accusation, or legal conclusion.

The working rule is narrow: use official source records, keep the link back to those records, and do not invent what is missing. Where a question depends on regulatory meaning, licensing enforcement, or legal interpretation, the agency's own records and qualified regulatory guidance control.

States covered

California is the pilot state, with coverage limited to the facility type and public record window described below. More states will be added, and each one arrives with its own agency, its own license categories, and its own way of classifying what an inspector found.

Records are never blended across states. Two agencies inspecting the same kind of facility do not use the same rules, the same severity classes, or the same reporting cadence, so a count from one state cannot be set beside a count from another as though they measured the same thing. Each state's records are read and presented in that state's own terms, and each has its own section below.

How the records are handled

The method below is the same in every state. What changes by state is the agency, the license category, and the vocabulary that agency uses.

Updates and date context

Records are periodically updated. There is no fixed update schedule yet; when one is set, it will be published here. Because public records change, dates matter more than totals. Three separate dates are worth keeping apart on any facility page:

• the date the official records were last checked
• the date of the most recent official report
• the dates of the individual deficiencies shown on the page

Those dates distinguish an old, resolved issue from a current one. A facility's conditions today may differ from what its latest available report describes.

Recent and repeated

Recent means within the last 12 months, measured against the date the records were last checked. Repeated topic means the same topic was cited in more than one report for that facility within 36 months. The repeat window is deliberately shorter than the published record: using the full record would make “repeated” mean nothing more than “appears twice, ever”.

What “corrected” means

Correction status is not a yes or no. Agency reports record several different things — an inspector seeing a fix, an operator reporting one, a plan, a deadline, a formal clearance — and collapsing them would overstate what was actually verified. A deadline is never presented as the date something was fixed, and a dismissal is not a correction.

The original record stays visible either way. A deficiency is not deleted or hidden because it was later corrected, and a later inspection with no findings is useful context rather than proof that an earlier one was resolved. The exact evidence states differ by state and are listed in each state's section.

What absence does not mean

A missing field, an unavailable report, an empty filtered view, or a facility no longer on a roster is never converted into zero deficiencies, a clean record, compliance, or closure.

This matters most for facilities that have not been inspected. A facility with no recorded deficiencies because it was inspected and nothing was cited is a different record from one with no recorded deficiencies because no inspection has happened. Those are shown as distinct states and never merged into a single reassuring one.

Missing reports and parser limits

The system is designed not to invent data.

If an official source lists a report that cannot be retrieved, that is treated as a source limitation. The system does not guess what the document said, and it does not treat the absence as evidence of anything. If a document exists but the parser cannot reliably extract a finding, the process is to stop and review the parser rather than publish uncertain structured data.

Quality control

Raw official bytes are preserved before anything is parsed. Every preserved document records its source identity, retrieval time, size, media type, and SHA-256 hash, so a displayed fact can be traced back to the exact bytes that produced it.

Parsing is deterministic and separate from collection: the same preserved document produces the same structured output under the same parser version. The import reconciles its results against the collection manifest before any of it is queryable.

Facility identity is source-qualified. Facilities, reports, and deficiencies are keyed on the issuing agency's own identifiers rather than on names, so two facilities with similar names are never merged and a renamed facility never becomes a second record. It is also what keeps two states' records from colliding as more are added.

Artificial intelligence

No part of the published record is generated by artificial intelligence. Facility counts, report counts, deficiency classifications, topic assignment, dates, sorting, and correction evidence are all produced by deterministic software rules. The site does not call a language model when a page loads, and no AI-generated text is displayed as a source fact.

California

California is the first state on the site. The Department of Social Services, Community Care Licensing Division licenses and inspects Residential Care Facilities for the Elderly, the license category that covers what most families call assisted living. Its public search is the CCLD care facility search, which is both where these records came from and the place to confirm a facility's current licensing status.

What is loaded

Coverage is every eligible ordinary Residential Care Facility for the Elderly in the state, official facility type 740. RCFE-CCRCs (type 741), nursing homes, and other care settings are excluded. Counties with no eligible facility have no records to show.

Complaint records and recorded deficiencies overlap and must never be added together: a deficiency cited during a complaint investigation appears in both the deficiency count and the complaint record it came from.

The public record window

CCLD describes its public facility-search history as a five-year window, and that is effectively what these records cover. A small number of older reports appear where the published record reached further back, but they are a handful among tens of thousands and should not be read as deeper history. A facility may have a longer regulatory history than the public search shows.

Type A and Type B deficiencies

California classifies each cited deficiency itself. These are the definitions as the official reports state them:

• Type A deficiencies are violations of licensing requirements that, if not corrected, have a direct and immediate risk to the health, safety, or personal rights of persons in care.
• Type B deficiencies are violations of licensing requirements that, without correction, could become a risk to the health, safety, or personal rights of persons in care.

Type B is not a “minor” class. It describes latent risk to the same three things Type A threatens, and it is the more common of the two. California's system is binary, and no middle tier is invented here, because a third level would be manufactured severity the state never assigned.

Severity is recorded per deficiency, not per rule and not per facility. The same regulation is cited at both levels depending on the circumstances, so severity cannot be inferred from the citation and topic cannot be inferred from the severity.

How deficiency topics are assigned

Each deficiency is grouped into one of 17 topics, taken from the regulation citation CDSS publishes on the deficiency itself rather than from reading the narrative text. The state has already said which rule was violated, so the topic follows an official field rather than software guessing at wording. Topic names are ours; CDSS publishes section numbers, not topic names.

The source carries 20 citations with evident transcription errors — a digit dropped, added, or transposed. Each was checked against that deficiency's own text and corrected before mapping, because otherwise those records would be silently dropped or filed under the wrong rule.

Where the source carries no citation, or one that does not resolve to a known section, the deficiency is shown as not classified in the source rather than placed in a general bucket.

What the correction evidence says

Each deficiency shows whichever of these the California record supports:

• the official record says the deficiency was corrected or cleared
• corrective action was observed by the evaluator
• corrective action was reported to the evaluator
• a plan of correction was recorded
• a correction deadline was recorded
• the citation was dismissed, which is not a correction
• correction is not verified in the available records

Version identifiers

• Source collection run: 20260829-ca-rcfe-statewide-v1
• Offline parse run: 20260902-statewide-phase4-parse-v1
• Report parser: ca_cdss_rcfe_statewide_phase4_lossless_parser_v1
• Import adapter: ca_cdss_rcfe_statewide_phase5_importer_v1
• Evidence window: Official public five-year report window

Known limitations

Public inspection data is valuable, and it is not perfect.

• official records may be incomplete, delayed, corrected, or temporarily unavailable;
• a facility's current conditions may differ from its most recent available report;
• reports do not include every detail a family would want to know;
• report wording and format vary by agency, by year, and by regional office;
• extraction from published documents can be imperfect;
• software classification can be wrong;
• the site makes no legal conclusions and no official regulatory determinations;
• the site does not replace calling a facility, visiting it, speaking with residents and families, or confirming current licensing status with the responsible agency.

For those reasons SeniorLivingFacts is a research aid. It helps families find and understand public records efficiently. It should not be the only step in a senior living decision.

Corrections and contact

If a family member, facility, regulator, or other reader believes a record is missing, stale, incorrectly classified, or incorrectly displayed, it can be sent for review. A useful correction report identifies the facility number, the report date, and exactly what appears wrong.

Corrections are checked against official source records. Where the public source record itself has changed, the displayed data updates on a future refresh. Reach us through the contact page.