Vermont Nursing Homes

1. Data Source and Methodology

This analysis is based entirely on data published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) through its Provider Data Catalog and Care Compare platform. All data used in this report is publicly available and updated by CMS on a regular basis.

The specific datasets used are:

Nursing Home Penalties — records of civil monetary fines and Medicare payment denials issued to certified nursing home facilities

Health Inspection Citations — deficiency findings from CMS health surveys, categorized by type and assigned a severity rating

Fire Safety Citations — deficiency findings from CMS fire safety inspections

Provider General Information — facility-level data including ownership type, chain affiliation, and CMS Special Focus Facility (SFF) status

Penalty data covers the period from 2023 through 2025, drawn from the CMS March 2026 release. CMS maintains a rolling window for penalty records; penalties that predate that window are no longer published by CMS regardless of status.

Health and fire safety citation data is sourced from the CMS March 2026 release exclusively. CMS maintains a rolling five-year window for citation records; citations that predate that window are no longer published by CMS regardless of correction status. This analysis reflects citations as published in the current release. Facility profile data is also sourced from the March 2026 release.

Analysis was conducted using OpenHealthData’s database. Vermont has 34 active Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing home facilities as of the March 2026 release.

2. Vermont — Special Focus Facilities

CMS identifies nursing home facilities with serious, persistent quality problems through its Special Focus Facility (SFF) program. Facilities formally designated as SFF are subject to mandatory enhanced oversight: surveys approximately every six months rather than annually, and escalating enforcement consequences if quality does not improve. An SFF Candidate is a facility that CMS has identified through its scoring methodology as having serious, persistent quality concerns, but has not yet been formally placed on the active SFF list.

As of the March 2026 CMS Provider Data release, Vermont has 6 facilities with SFF or SFF Candidate status — one formally designated SFF and five carrying Candidate status. This represents 17.6 percent of Vermont’s 34 active nursing home facilities, more than double the rate of any other New England state.

Vermont SFF and Candidate Facilities

3. Vermont — Scope of Penalties

Between 2023 and 2025, CMS issued 49 penalty actions against Vermont nursing homes — 39 civil monetary fines and 10 Medicare payment denials.

Total verified fines across the state came to $3,130,210. In addition to monetary fines, CMS issued payment denials that collectively blocked facilities from receiving reimbursement for new Medicare admissions for a combined 428 days.

Vermont Facility Penalty Summary

Eleven facilities have no penalty record in the current CMS data window: Cedar Hill Health Care Center (Windsor), Center for Living & Rehabilitation (Bennington), Gill Odd Fellows Home of Vermont (Ludlow), Greensboro Nursing Home (Greensboro), Helen Porter Healthcare & Rehab (Middlebury), Maple Lane Nursing Home (Barton), Mayo Healthcare Inc. (Northfield), Pine Heights at Brattleboro (Brattleboro), Pines Rehab & Health Center (Lyndonville), Vermont Veterans’ Home (Bennington), and Wake Robin-Linden Nursing Home (Shelburne).

Fine Concentration

The top three penalized facilities — Springfield Health & Rehab, Premier Rehab and Healthcare at Berlin, and St. Johnsbury Health & Rehab — account for $1,381,406 in fines, representing 44.1 percent of all Vermont fines in the dataset. The top five facilities account for 57.5 percent.

4. Vermont — Trajectory

Annual fine totals for Vermont nursing homes increased in every year of the analysis period. The following table shows annual fine totals for the ten highest-penalized facilities.

Annual Fines — Top 10 Facilities

Springfield Health & Rehab received $100,555 in fines in 2024 and $536,912 in 2025 — the largest single-year fine total recorded for any Vermont facility in this dataset.

Facilities Penalized in Multiple Calendar Years

Nine facilities received CMS fines in two or more calendar years during the analysis period.

5. Vermont — Citation Severity

CMS assigns a severity rating to each deficiency citation using a standardized scale. The ratings most relevant to this analysis are:

G, H, I — Actual Harm: CMS determination that residents experienced actual harm as a result of the deficiency, ranging from isolated incidents (G) to a pattern (H) to widespread (I).

J, K, L — Immediate Jeopardy: CMS determination that the facility’s action or inaction has caused, or is likely to cause, serious injury, harm, impairment, or death to a resident. Scope ranges from isolated (J) to pattern (K) to widespread (L).

Immediate Jeopardy is the most serious classification in the CMS rating system. Citation data in this section reflects the CMS March 2026 release.

Immediate Jeopardy Health Citations

Vermont nursing homes received 30 Immediate Jeopardy citations across 11 facilities. Severity breakdown: J = 15, K = 5, L = 10.

Barre Gardens Nursing and Rehab in Barre carries one Severity L citation — Immediate Jeopardy, widespread scope — issued November 13, 2025, for the facility’s inability to produce a plan for conducting required quality assurance activities. As of the March 2026 CMS data release, no plan of correction has been filed.

Immediate Jeopardy Citations by Deficiency Category

Five of the 30 Immediate Jeopardy citations are specifically classified under Freedom from Abuse, Neglect, and Exploitation.

Actual Harm and Immediate Jeopardy — Combined (Severity G through L)

Across all severity levels from G through L, Vermont nursing homes received 92 serious citations across 21 facilities.

Elderwood at Burlington received 11 Actual Harm citations without reaching the Immediate Jeopardy threshold. The facility received $252,434 in CMS fines during the same period.

Fire Safety Citations

CMS issued 130 fire safety citations across 30 of Vermont’s 34 active nursing home facilities. Of those, 78 were rated at severity D or above, indicating potential for harm or worse. One citation was rated H, indicating an actual harm finding in a pattern of fire safety deficiency.

Of the 130 citations, 34 carry a status of no plan of correction — meaning the facility had not submitted a correction plan as of the March 2026 CMS release.

Top 8 by Citation Count

Vermont Veterans’ Home, a facility owned and operated by the State of Vermont, has 18 fire safety citations on record in the current CMS release, 17 of which are rated at potential harm or above and 5 of which carry no plan of correction.

6. New England — Regional Context

To assess whether Vermont’s findings reflect a state-specific pattern or a broader regional condition, the same penalty analysis was applied to all active nursing home facilities in the five other New England states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Data source and methodology are identical to the Vermont analysis.

State Summary

Vermont’s average fine per facility ($92,065) is the highest in the region. Vermont has 6 SFF or candidate facilities across 34 total facilities, an SFF rate of 17.6 percent — more than double that of any other New England state.

Annual Fine Totals by State

Vermont shows an unbroken year-over-year increase across all three years — $500k in 2023, $1,044k in 2024, and $1,586k in 2025.

7. Secondary Finding — Ownership Structure

As part of the Vermont analysis, facility ownership data from the CMS Provider General Information dataset was joined against the penalty record. The results are presented here as an observed dimension of the data, not as a conclusion.

CMS classifies nursing home ownership into categories including for-profit corporation, for-profit LLC, non-profit corporation, and government. CMS separately tracks chain affiliation — whether a facility is part of a recognized multi-facility operator group — independent of ownership type.

For this analysis, Vermont facilities were grouped into four categories: for-profit chain, for-profit independent, government, and non-profit. Chain affiliation is defined as membership in a for-profit multi-facility operator group. Non-profit facilities affiliated with health systems are classified by ownership type, not chain status.

Penalty Distribution by Ownership Category — Vermont

Chain Operators in Vermont

8. About OpenHealthData and This Analysis

OpenHealthData is a healthcare data intelligence platform founded by Miles Crow and based in Vermont. The platform is built on public datasets published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, covering: hospitals, nursing homes, home health, hospice, dialysis, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, long-term care hospitals.

CMS publishes and updates this data on a regular basis. It is freely available to the public. The analysis in this report required no proprietary data sources and no data requests.

The findings in this report were produced using OpenHealthData’s database, which aggregates and structures CMS data releases to enable systematic analysis across facilities, time periods, and geographies. All underlying data is traceable to its CMS source. The methodology is reproducible.

This report covers all Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing home facilities in Vermont and the five other New England states as of the CMS March 2026 data release. Penalty data covers the period from 2023 through 2025. Facilities operating exclusively on a private-pay basis and not enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid are not included in CMS data and are therefore not reflected in this analysis.

OpenHealthData does not have a financial relationship with any facility, chain, or organization referenced in this report. This analysis was not commissioned by any third party.

For questions about the data, methodology, or findings, contact Miles Crow at OpenHealthData.