Methods and limitations
Public records should come with context.
Minnesota Care Watch organizes assisted-living records from the Minnesota Department of Health and keeps a traceable path back to the source.
Purpose
What this project is for
The goal is to help Minnesota residents, families, journalists, and advocates find facility information and review regulatory source documents. The site presents records and their provenance. It does not rate facilities, recommend providers, or create regulatory conclusions.
Current coverage
Minneapolis is the active scope
The facility directory includes 178 assisted-living records whose city is listed as Minneapolis in the supplied MDH facility master. Regulatory collection is currently limited to a fixed set of those facilities. A facility can appear in the directory before this project has collected its evaluations or investigations.
An empty record list is not a clean-record finding. It means only that this project has no imported regulatory records for that facility.
Record types
How to read the labels
- Evaluation
- A record listed by MDH in the source system’s evaluation or inspection collection. One PDF may contain multiple events or references.
- Investigation
- A record listed by MDH in the source system’s complaint or investigation collection.
- MDH investigation status
- The exact status text supplied for an individual investigation listing, such as Substantiated, Unsubstantiated, or Inconclusive. It is not a facility-wide status.
- Posted and concluded
- Calendar dates supplied by the MDH listing. They remain separate from the date this project retrieved the record and from dates printed inside a PDF.
- HFID
- Minnesota Health Facility ID, used as the canonical external identifier when matching MDH facility and regulatory data.
Sources and provenance
Every imported record points back to evidence
Original government files are preserved exactly as received. The project records the source URL, retrieval time, filename, byte size, and SHA-256 checksum. Regulatory observations also retain the exact location and values from the source listing. Repeated collection appends history rather than replacing prior observations.
Facility pages provide two document paths when available:
- Preserved PDF: the exact file acquired by this project at that observation.
- Current MDH link: the government-hosted location, which may later change.
Important limitations
What the data cannot tell you by itself
- Current coverage is incomplete and should not be used to rank facilities.
- Absence from an imported response does not prove absence of regulatory history.
- A listed status applies to its source investigation, not the entire facility.
- The project does not infer active license status, capacity, ownership, quality, or safety when the source does not provide a verified value.
- Government systems can revise or republish records. Preserved observations show what this project received at a particular time.
Ready to review a facility?
Search the Minneapolis directory and follow each record back to its source.