How We Rank Facilities — Methodology and Editorial Standards

Most senior care referral services will not tell you how they order the facilities they show you. We will. This page is the complete description. If our results ever appear inconsistent with it, that is a defect and we want to hear about it at info@jagua.ai.

The short version

We rank on care quality drawn from public regulatory records, filtered to facilities licensed for the care level you need in the area you specified. Whether a facility pays us is not a ranking input and cannot be.

What goes in

Filters applied before ranking. A facility appears only if it holds a current, active license; is licensed for the level of care described; has capacity type matching the need; and is within the geographic area requested. Facilities with a suspended, revoked, expired, or pending-revocation license are excluded and labeled.

How we order what is left. We publish the inputs and how much each matters relative to the others. We do not publish a numeric weight table, because a table of decimals invites the impression of a precision that public regulatory data does not support. What we publish instead is a set of rules you can check us against.

Rule one, and it overrides everything else. A facility with a severe or repeated substantiated citation in the prior 24 months is never ranked above a facility without one. No other factor — not care-level match, not proximity, and certainly not any commercial relationship — can move it up past that line. If you ever see otherwise, that is a defect and we want to know.

Below that line, facilities are ordered by, in descending order of influence:

1. Number and severity of substantiated citations in the prior 24 months.
2. Substantiated complaints in the prior 24 months.
3. Enforcement actions, civil penalties, and administrative actions on record.
4. Recency and outcome of the most recent state inspection. A facility not inspected recently is not treated as a facility with a clean record; it is treated as a facility we know less about, and we say so on the listing.
5. Demonstrated capability for the specific care level described, verified against the license category and facility-supplied staffing information.
6. Change of ownership or administrator in the prior 12 months. This is a stability signal, not a quality signal, and it carries the least influence of anything on this list.

For skilled nursing facilities only, CMS Care Compare quality measures, staffing data, and the Five-Star rating are added to the above. Note that CMS refreshes Five-Star ratings quarterly and some underlying datasets monthly, so a CMS rating may reflect conditions from several months earlier.

Ties. Where facilities are indistinguishable on the above, ordering is by proximity to the location you gave us. Never by price, and never by whether the facility pays us.

What is deliberately excluded

The following are not ranking inputs and are not accessible to the ranking system:

• Whether a facility has a paid referral agreement with Jagua. Stored in a separate system from the facility record. Not joined at query time.
• How much a facility pays us.
• Rent, price, or monthly cost. Used as a filter you control, never as a ranking signal. A more expensive facility does not rank higher.
• Whether a facility accepts Medi-Cal. Used as a filter you control.
• Advertising, sponsorship, or promotional payment. We do not sell placement in results, and we do not accept advertising from facilities.
• Personal or business relationships between any Jagua officer, employee, or contractor and any facility. Any facility with such a relationship is excluded from ranked results entirely and disclosed on its listing.

What we cannot tell you

We want to be exact about the limits, because a ranking that oversells its own reliability is the failure mode this company exists to correct.

Public regulatory data is a lagging and partial signal. An inspection record describes what an inspector found on one day. Citations reflect what was observed and substantiated, not everything that occurred. A facility with a clean record may be poorly run; a facility with a citation may have fixed the problem thoroughly. Small six-bed board-and-care homes are inspected on a different cadence than large communities and their records are not directly comparable.

Our ranking is a starting point for your own investigation. It is not a clinical assessment, not a safety guarantee, and not a substitute for visiting.

How current the data is

Facility records are refreshed from CDSS Community Care Licensing weekly. Every facility profile displays the date its underlying records were last retrieved. CMS data for skilled nursing facilities is refreshed monthly, following CMS's own publication cycle.

If a state record changed after our last refresh, we will not know about it. The state's records are authoritative; ours are a copy. Check ccld.dss.ca.gov directly for anything that matters.

Corrections

If you are a family and something on a facility profile is wrong, tell us at info@jagua.ai. We investigate within five business days and correct or explain.

If you are a facility and believe your profile misstates your record, email info@jagua.ai with the license number and the specific field. We correct verified errors within five business days. We do not remove accurate, sourced information about citations or enforcement actions, and we do not remove or reorder listings in exchange for payment, advertising, or a referral agreement. Requests of that kind are declined and logged.

Editorial standards for our written content

• Every factual claim about regulations, benefits, costs, or facility requirements cites a primary source — a state or federal agency, statute, or regulation — with a retrieval date.
• We do not cite content aggregators or competitor marketing pages as authority for facts.
• Cost figures state their source, geography, and year.
• Guides are reviewed for currency at least every 12 months, and immediately whenever the underlying statute, regulation, or benefit amount changes. Every guide displays a last-reviewed date.
• We do not publish content written to rank rather than to inform, and we do not publish thin templated pages for locations we have not researched.
• Content covering VA benefits is reviewed against our compliance guardrails before publication and never solicits benefits-claims business.
• Corrections are made in place with a dated correction note, not silently.

Version history

Methodology changes are versioned and archived. We will not change the methodology to favor a facility or a commercial relationship.

Questions: info@jagua.ai