SNF Scout test · Tested October 10, 2026
We asked two AI assistants fifteen questions about Birmingham’s nursing homes.
A leading general-purpose AI assistant with web search, and SNF Scout, the AI assistant inside SNF Insights that answers from ten years of CMS ratings, PBJ staffing, cost reports, MDS and payer data. Same day, same questions, every answer checked against the source data. The questions are the ones operators get asked before hospital network meetings, payer negotiations, QAPI reviews and board meetings.
Updated October 10, 2026 · Sources: CMS Provider Information (September 2026), PBJ staffing 2026 Q1, CMS MDS frequency files, Medicare cost reports, CMS Medicare Advantage enrollment and 2026 plan benefit files, payer Transparency in Coverage files (June 2026)
The scorecard: SNF Scout 15 of 15
| Question (Jefferson County and Alabama) | General assistant | SNF Scout |
|---|---|---|
| Tags one home was cited for more than once | Correct | Correct |
| Local homes ranked by short-stay rehospitalization | Partial · missed 11 of 34 homes | Correct |
| Highest and lowest long-stay hospitalization rates | Partial · missed the highest | Correct |
| Local homes ranked by nursing staff turnover | Partial · missed 11 of 34 homes | Correct |
| Most-cited F-tags and those at harm level | Partial · incomplete count | Correct |
| One home’s occupancy and staffing over 3 years | Partial · today only | Correct · every quarter |
| One home’s occupancy growth vs. its 10 nearest | Partial · no growth figure | Correct |
| Medicare Advantage share, top insurers, HMO vs. PPO | Partial · no insurer counts | Correct · 68.6% |
| What MA members pay for a SNF stay after day 20 | Partial · some plans, one wrong | Correct · all 12 plans |
| Homes getting over 5% of nursing hours from agency | No answer · not computed | Correct · 1 of 34 |
| Shortest and longest director of nursing tenure | No answer · not published | Correct |
| Star-rating gains and losses since 2022 | No answer · today only | Correct |
| Coding of shortness of breath lying flat, and trend | No answer · “not public” | Correct · 11 quarters |
| Median operating margin, Alabama homes | No answer · national figure | Correct |
| UnitedHealthcare and Aetna room-and-board rates | No answer · not public | Correct · 174 / 113 homes |
| Result | 1 correct · 8 partial · 6 none | 15 correct |
In its own words
“Filtering the CMS Provider Information dataset on state=AL and county=Jefferson returned 23 nursing homes.”
General assistant, on the county list (it has 34; the rankings missed the other 11)
SNF Scout
All 34, every one ranked
“…which I couldn’t do reliably with web tools.”
General assistant, on agency staffing from the CMS payroll file
SNF Scout
1 of 34 homes over 5%, at 10.0%
“Facility-level MDS item frequencies are not public.”
General assistant, on shortness-of-breath coding
SNF Scout
11 quarters of it, home by home
What the answers looked like
Condensed from the same run. Facility names are replaced with letters; every number is as answered.
What do Blue Cross and VIVA Medicare Advantage members pay for a SNF stay after day 20?
General assistant
Found three Blue Cross plans and one VIVA plan from search snippets and plan-finder pages, listed one Blue Cross plan at $221 a day (the filing says $218), and noted: “I could not parse VIVA’s other plans or the plan PDFs directly.”
SNF Scout
| 2026 plans, in-network | Plans | Days 21+ |
|---|---|---|
| Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama | 3 | $218/day to day 100 |
| 1 | $125/day, days 21–55 | |
| VIVA Health | 4 | $218/day, days 21–63 |
| 2 | $218/day, days 21–50 | |
| 2 | $0 or $218/day, days 21–51 |
All 12 plans from CMS’s 2026 benefit filings. Same insurer, different answers, so the plan matters at admission.
What do UnitedHealthcare and Aetna pay Alabama nursing homes for room and board?
General assistant
“These rates sit only in the insurers’ Transparency-in-Coverage machine-readable files, which are multi-gigabyte JSON. A web assistant can’t parse them.”
SNF Scout
| Payer | Homes | Median / day | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|
| UnitedHealthcare | 174 | $426.50 | $405 – $450 |
| Aetna | 113 | $425.00 | $300 – $541 |
Medians nearly identical; UnitedHealthcare’s rates cluster within $45, Aetna’s spread across $241.
How many Jefferson County homes got over 5% of nursing hours from agency staff?
General assistant
Named the right CMS file, then: adding it up “for 23 homes across about 90 days each, which I couldn’t do reliably with web tools.”
SNF Scout
| Q1 2026 | All nursing | RN | LPN | CNA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home A | 10.0% | 31.5% | 1.7% | 8.5% |
1 of 34 homes was over 5%. Six more used some agency staff but stayed under; 27 used none. Every day of the quarter, by role.
Who codes shortness of breath lying flat (MDS J1100C) most, and how has it changed?
General assistant
“Facility-level MDS item frequencies are not public.” (They are: CMS publishes them quarterly in its MDS frequency files.)
SNF Scout
| Home | Coded yes, Apr 2026 | Dec 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Home E | 48.6% | — |
| Home F | 39.7% | 43.6% |
| Home G | 29.6% | 0% |
Across 11 quarters, Home F peaked at 75.5% in January 2026 and Home G climbed from 0% to about 30%. Small homes, so a few residents swing these rates.
How we tested
Both assistants answered the same 15 questions on October 10, 2026, one question at a time. The general assistant was a current general-purpose AI model allowed unlimited web searches; it went further than most users would, calling CMS’s public data APIs directly. We wrote the answer to every question ourselves in SQL against the source data before either assistant answered, then scored each answer: correct (right, complete and current), partial (right in part, or sampled, estimated or stale) or no answer (could not answer, or gave a different figure).
AI answers vary from run to run. Five earlier runs on 13-, 14- and 15-question versions of the test are kept on file with this one; in those the general assistant got 4 to 7 right and SNF Scout 12 to 14. In this run the general assistant’s data request returned 23 of the county’s 34 homes, which cost it the ranking questions. General AI models are improving quickly, so the result is dated: it shows where things stood on October 10, 2026.
Results reflect this test and do not guarantee how either assistant will answer in the future; AI models and the underlying data change over time. Figures are for information only; verify them before using them in financial, clinical or contracting decisions.
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