Methodology & data
Every data point we ship can be traced to a primary source. Here is exactly where the data comes from, how we resolve it, and how we score our confidence.
We build only on primary public and officially published sources across UK health and social care. We do not resell another company's compiled database. We rebuild from the original records, so provenance is clean and the licence is ours to use.
| Source | What we take | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| CQC register | Registrations, locations, service types, ratings | Open Government Licence |
| Companies House | Owners, PSCs, charges, filings, accounts | Open Government Licence |
| The Gazette | Insolvency and winding-up notices | Open Government Licence |
| NHS & ODS data | Organisation codes, healthcare provider references | Open Government Licence |
| ONS | Population, geography and market context | Open Government Licence |
| Provider websites | Self-pay fees, services, published contacts | Public pages |
| Procurement portals | Council and ICB contracts and awards | Public tenders |
| Job boards | Manager and role vacancies | Public listings |
That is the core. In practice we ingest dozens of official and public sources, and we add more as the market gives us reason to.
The value is not any single source. It is the join. We link a Companies House company to the CQC locations it controls, to the people on the register, to the fees on the provider's own site. Names are messy and there is no shared key, so we use AI-assisted entity resolution, address matching and fuzzy name matching, and we keep the full history of every link.
Every data point carries three things: a link to the source record, the old value and the new value, and a confidence score between 0 and 1. High-certainty facts, like a rating published by the CQC, score 1.0. Inferred links, like matching a trading name to a company, score lower and show you why. You always see the working.
Some of this data, such as directors, persons of significant control and named managers, is personal data. We only use records where publication is legally mandated and the re-use is legitimate, we minimise and aggregate where we can, and we honour erasure requests. We do not build profiles of private individuals.
Care Market Monitor uses CQC data published under the Open Government Licence, with attribution. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the Care Quality Commission. The CQC is the authoritative source for regulatory ratings. Where our record and theirs ever differ, theirs is correct.
Care Market Monitor is an independent, ICO-registered data controller. Questions about the data, a correction, or an erasure request: [email protected].