WASHINGTON, D.C. (November 24, 2020)—The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released Care Compare on medicare.gov in September, to streamline the eight original health care compare tools. Since then, providers have had the opportunity to use and familiarize themselves with Care Compare while having the option to use the original compare tools, too.
The eight original compare tools—like Nursing Home Compare, Hospital Compare, Physician Compare—will be retired on December 1st, ending this transition period. If you haven’t been using Care Compare, CMS urges you to:
Use Care Compare on medicare.gov and encourage people with Medicare and their caregivers to start using it, too. Go to Medicare.gov and choose “Find care”.
Update any links to the eight original care tools on your public-facing websites so they’ll direct your audiences to Care Compare.
Care Compare offers a new design that makes it easier to find the same information that’s on the original compare tools. It gives you, patients, and caregivers one place to find cost, quality of care, service volume, and other CMS quality data to help make informed health care decisions.
Now, instead of having to search through many compare tools, with just one click on Care Compare, you’ll find easy-to-understand information about nursing homes, hospitals, doctors, and other health care providers.
Please remember that when CMS retires the eight original compare tools, you will still be able to find information about health care providers and CMS quality data on Care Compare, as well as download CMS publicly reported data from the Provider Data Catalog on cms.gov. Fully transitioning to these tools does not change how CMS measures quality.
