Records desk / source manifest

Sources, pull dates and licence status

This desk publishes numbers copied from public files. That is only worth anything if you can see which file, pulled when, and under what terms. Here is all of it, including the two records whose reuse terms this desk has not been able to resolve and what it has done about them.

The rule this site is built on

No figure appears on this site unless it can be reproduced from a named public file. There are no estimates, no modelled numbers, no proprietary scores, no editorial rankings and no reviews. Where a question cannot be answered from a public file, the answer given is that it cannot be answered from a public file. A page that would need an invented number to exist does not get published, and one such page is currently unpublished for that reason and named below.

1. CMS Home Health Care Agencies

Identifier: 6jpm-sxkc, file HH_Provider_Jul2026.csv
Publisher: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Provider Data Catalog
URL: https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/dataset/6jpm-sxkc
Release: July 2026, portal record issued 2026-05-27
Pulled: 2026-09-10
Licence: Work of the United States federal government, public domain
Used on: the star ratings file and the homepage counts
Extract: 50 agencies with a metro street address, of which 47 carry a quality of patient care star rating and 3 do not

2. CMS Home Health Care Patient Survey, HHCAHPS

Identifier: ccn4-8vby, file HHCAHPS_Provider_Jul2026.csv
Publisher: CMS Provider Data Catalog. Survey period 2025 Q1 to 2025 Q4
URL: https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/dataset/ccn4-8vby
Pulled: 2026-09-10
Licence: Public domain
Join: On CMS Certification Number. 38 of the 47 star-rated metro agencies carry a survey summary star; the rest are shown as having none rather than as a zero
Used on: the survey stars file, which sorts on it, and as the second column of the star ratings file
Used on: the survey stars file, which sorts on it, and as the second column of the star ratings file

3. CMS Home Health Care Zip Codes

Identifier: m5eg-upu5, file HH_Zip_Jul2026.csv
Publisher: CMS Provider Data Catalog
URL: https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/dataset/m5eg-upu5
Pulled: 2026-09-10
Licence: Public domain
Used on: the zip code file, and folded into 15 counties on the county coverage file
Extract: 3,563 agency to zip rows across 262 metro zip codes, representing 81 distinct certification numbers reporting service somewhere in the metro

4. Missouri DHSS, Home Health In-State Certified Providers

Identifier: 3dcz-79am on data.mo.gov
Publisher: Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, Bureau of Home Care and Rehabilitative Standards
URL: https://data.mo.gov/dataset/Home-Health-In-State-Certified-Providers/3dcz-79am, with the department's own directory at health.mo.gov
Portal record updated: 2026-09-04
Pulled: 2026-09-10
Licence: Null. The portal record carries no machine readable licence statement. This is a public record published by a state agency, and this desk treats the underlying facts as public, but the absence of an explicit reuse licence is a real gap and is recorded here rather than papered over. Row-level republication of this file is limited on this site to counts and to describing what the directory contains. Individual agency rows from it are not reproduced as a table.
Extract: 39 distinct agencies listing at least one St. Louis metro Missouri county as a service area
Used on: the county counts file, as counts per county and a distribution of counties named per agency. No agency row is reproduced
Used on: the county counts file, as counts per county and a distribution of counties named per agency. No agency row is reproduced

5. Illinois IDPH, Home Services Agency Directory

Identifier: 9miz-pbzm on data.illinois.gov, 1,029 rows
Publisher: Illinois Department of Public Health
URL: https://data.illinois.gov/d/9miz-pbzm
Metadata read: 2026-09-10
Licence: Null. As with the Missouri portal, the dataset record carries no machine readable licence statement.
Status: HELD: A table of the currently unexpired licensed home services agencies in the Illinois metro east, filtered on expiry date at or after the pull date, is prepared and is not published. It is not linked from any page here and is not in the sitemap. This desk will not republish a state licensing file at row level, naming individual licensees, until a person has read the portal's terms of use and confirmed that doing so is permitted. That is a deliberate hold. The Illinois directory is still cited and linked as a place for families to search themselves, on the walkthrough and in the two-categories file, because linking to a public search tool raises none of the same questions as republishing its contents.

6. NPPES, the federal provider registry

Source: National Plan and Provider Enumeration System public API, enumeration type NPI-2, taxonomy 253Z00000X
URL: https://npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov/search
Pulled: 2026-09-10
Licence: Public domain
Method: One query per metro zip code, paged to exhaustion, deduplicated by NPI, filtered to records whose own practice-location zip is a metro zip and whose taxonomy list contains the code. City spelling variants of Saint normalised
Extract: 1,162 organisational registrations across 65 cities
Published as: Counts by city only, and the same counts added up by county on the county file. No provider names, no NPI numbers, no addresses. See the city file for why, and for what an NPI does not mean

7. Census Bureau, 2020 ZCTA to county relationship file

Publisher: United States Census Bureau
URL: https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-files/time-series/geo/relationship-files.html
Pulled: 2026-09-10
Licence: Public domain
Purpose: Six sources, six different ideas of place. This file fixes one boundary and applies it to all of them. The area is the St. Louis Missouri and Illinois metropolitan statistical area: the city of St. Louis and St. Louis, St. Charles, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln and Warren counties in Missouri, and Madison, St. Clair, Monroe, Clinton, Bond, Macoupin, Calhoun and Jersey counties in Illinois. A zip code counts as metro if any of its land area falls inside one of the fifteen. Where a page names one county for a zip code that straddles a boundary, it names the county holding the largest share of that zip code's land
Consequence: A count filtered this way will not match a count someone else publishes using a looser or tighter St. Louis. Neither is wrong. The boundary is written down here so the difference is visible instead of mysterious

Corrections, and what this desk will not do

If a figure here does not match its source, the source is right. Report it through the request form or by phone and it will be corrected or the page will be withdrawn.

Four standing rules. This desk publishes no review, no star of its own invention and no editorial ranking of care providers: every rating on this site was computed by CMS. It publishes no price, rate or cost figure for care, because no public source carries them for this metro. It publishes no health claim without a named government source and a working link. And it takes no payment for a position in any table: the one paid placement on this site is boxed, labelled on every page it appears, and drawn from no dataset.

Who publishes this

Home Care Check is published by OwnersFirm. New Plan Care, which appears in the labelled placement box, is a client of OwnersFirm and pays for that box. That is the entire relationship and it is disclosed on every page carrying the box, in the footer of every page on the site, and here. New Plan Care has no involvement in which files this desk publishes or what they say, no agency named in any public record on this site has any relationship with the publisher, and no such connection is implied anywhere.

This site carries no client-side analytics tag of any kind.