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AL SilverScore - Methodology v1

Last updated 2026-04-26. Methodology version al-v1.

AL SilverScore rates assisted living, memory care, personal care homes, adult family homes, and similar state-licensed senior care facilities. There is no federal CMS rating for these facility types, so the score is built entirely from data published by state licensing agencies. The methodology is intentionally narrow: we score only what we can measure today, and we name what we can't.

Data Inputs

  • State licensing rosters - facility name, address, capacity, license type, current status, and ownership type for ~32,700 currently-tracked facilities across all 50 states + DC.
  • State citation records - ~360,000 state-published citations and complaint findings, with survey date, citation code, severity classification, and (where the state publishes it) correction date.
  • State enforcement actions - ~1,300 license actions: revocations, suspensions, probation orders, monetary penalties, and license denials.
  • Historical state-facility records - temporally versioned snapshots of capacity and ownership that surface change events over time.

Sources are catalogued at SilverOcean Data Sources and audited at Ingest Health (admin access).

The Six Dimensions

Compliance Risk (weight 3)

Severity-weighted citation density per bed over the last 36 months, with an additional penalty for severe citations in the last 12 months. Severity is normalized across state-specific scales (CA Type A/B, CMS scope/severity letters, plain-text Class I/II/III).

  • Citation count last 36 months
  • Severity classification per citation (mapped to a 4-level scale)
  • Citation count last 12 months at moderate-or-higher severity
  • Licensed bed capacity (citations are normalized per bed)

Compliance Velocity (weight 1.5)

Median days from citation date to correction date. Operators that move fast on findings score higher. States that don't publish correction dates result in a neutral score (not a penalty).

  • Per-citation correction date (where state publishes it)

Enforcement Risk (weight 3)

Active and recent license actions. Revocations dominate (any revocation in the last 24 months drives this dimension to zero). Suspensions, probations, and monetary fines each have separate sub-weights.

  • License revocations (last 24 months)
  • License suspensions (last 24 months)
  • Probation orders (last 24 months)
  • Sum of monetary fines (last 24 months)

Longitudinal Trustability (weight 2)

Citation rate trend across two consecutive 12-month windows (last 12 vs prior 12 months). Improving trends raise the score; declining trends lower it. Captures whether an operator is getting better or worse.

  • Severity-weighted citations per bed, last 12 months
  • Severity-weighted citations per bed, months 13-24 ago
  • Direction and magnitude of change

Ownership Stability (weight 1.5)

Detected ownership changes over the lifetime of the facility's record. Frequent ownership churn correlates with quality decline.

  • Distinct ownership_type values across temporally versioned records

Capacity Stability (weight 1)

Bed count volatility. Steady capacity is rewarded; sudden shrinks often signal regulatory or financial stress.

  • Distinct licensed bed counts across temporally versioned records

What AL SilverScore v1 deliberately does not measure

  • Resident outcomes - assisted living has no MDS-equivalent. Outcome metrics (falls, hospitalizations, mortality) require operator integration or claims data, neither of which is public for AL.
  • Staffing turnover, tenure, or wages - AL is exempt from the federal PBJ payroll system that powers SNF staffing analysis. State data does not capture per-employee continuity.
  • Litigation or claims data - court records and carrier claims data are Phase 2 work, dependent on ResDAC research data access (6-12 month procurement) and direct carrier partnerships.
  • Resident satisfaction or family sentiment - third-party review platforms have material gaming and selection bias. We do not incorporate them.

Confidence score

Each AL SilverScore comes with a confidence value (0.4-1.0) reflecting how much underlying data the facility has. Facilities with at least 5 citations spanning 24+ months and any enforcement record reach the top of the confidence range. Newly licensed facilities or those in states with sparse public publishing sit at the floor.

Methodology versioning

Every score is stamped with the methodology version that produced it (al-v1 for the current methodology). Historical scores remain comparable across versions. When the methodology changes, both old and new scores are computed for the same facility and the version field makes the comparison explicit.

For carriers and institutional buyers: the AL SilverScore methodology is open for audit. Source data, normalization rules, and weights are all published here and at /admin/silverscore (admin access). For commercial use of California CCL data specifically, SilverOcean is in the process of obtaining a CDSS Data Use Agreement; California-specific facility scores carry a notation pending license completion.
Questions about this methodology? Contact methodology@silverocean.ai