The Data Is Free. The Reading Is Not.
Every owner who hears about my CMS Performance Audit asks the same question, and it is a fair one. The data is public. CMS publishes it for free. Why would anybody pay to read it?
Here is my honest answer, starting with what the free data actually hands you.
What “free” gets you
The CMS Provider Data Catalog will give you the home health release, all 12,409 agencies in the current one, dated October 21, 2026. Your agency is in there. So is every competitor in your market. What you get is rows and measure codes. What you do not get is your record pulled out, read in plain language, and ranked by what to fix first.
That gap is the whole product. Nobody pays me for the data. They pay for the reading.
What the reading adds
A measure means nothing until you know three things: where your number sits against the nation, which direction is good, and what operation is driving it. Hospitalizations should be low. Timeliness should be high. A spending index has to be read in context. Get one direction wrong and you fix the wrong thing with confidence.
Here is one real record from the current release, name withheld. Timely start of care: 82.54 percent, against 96.59 nationally. That is fourteen points of first visits starting late. Readmissions: 4.82 against 4.13. Hospitalizations: 8.13 against 10.83, which is better than the nation, and a good audit says that too, because a strength you do not know about is a practice you cannot protect. Star rating 3.0, right at the middle, hiding all of it.
That owner did not need the data. The data was already public. That owner needed somebody to read it in the right order.
Why the numbers carry money
Under the expanded Home Health Value-Based Purchasing model, every Medicare certified agency gets a Total Performance Score built from quality measures, and Medicare adjusts your payments based on it, up to 5 percent down or 5 percent up. CMS lays the model out here. Five percent of Medicare revenue is not a rounding error for a small agency. It is a hire. It is the margin.
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And payment is only half of it. Referral sources read the same public record. A hospital discharge planner comparing two agencies in your zip code is looking at your numbers whether you have ever seen them or not.
Could you read it yourself?
Yes, and I will tell you how, because an owner who reads their own record needs me less and trusts me more. Download your agency’s row from the Provider Data Catalog. Pull five measures: star rating, timely start of care, potentially preventable readmissions, potentially preventable hospitalizations, and the Medicare spend per episode index. Write the national figure next to each of yours. Mark the direction on every line before you judge any of them. Then fix the widest gap first, not the one that stings most.
Most owners never do this. Not because they cannot, but because the file was built for analysts, and the week fills up. That is the honest reason the audit exists.
What I built
The free CMS preview does the first read for nothing: your agency against the nation, the five measures, plain verdicts. The full CMS Performance Audit ranks the gaps and turns them into a 30 day corrective plan. And if you want the fixes done rather than listed, that is the consulting work I take on at Boswell Consulting Agency: send me the report, I review the problem on paper for free, and you pay only if you hire me to do the fix.
Run your preview first. If your numbers surprise you, the data was never the problem. Not reading it was.
Run the free CMS preview: app.boswellconsultingagency.com/mini-audit
Dr. Devon Boswell, DBA
Boswell Consulting Agency
General information based on public data. Not guaranteed information, and not legal, clinical, billing, or regulatory advice.
Originally published at https://muse.ai.
