The State Keeps a File on Every Licensed Community Here. Most Families Never Open It.

By Indy Senior Advisor Care Team · September 18, 2026

What You Are Actually Reading When You Google a Community

You type the name of an assisted living community into Google. You get a star rating, a handful of reviews, three directory sites that all look official, and a phone number that rings somewhere in another state. None of that is the regulatory record. It is marketing, plus whatever families and former employees felt strongly enough to post.

A five-star Google rating measures how the front desk made someone feel. It does not tell you whether a state surveyor walked through that building unannounced last spring and wrote up a medication error. Those are different questions, and only one of them is answered by a public record.

Indiana keeps that record. The Indiana Department of Health publishes a consumer report on every licensed healthcare facility in the state, and the report includes survey history. It costs nothing. You do not have to file a request or talk to anyone. And in our experience, fewer than one family in twenty has looked at it before they sign a residency agreement.

What IDOH Actually Publishes

IDOH's Consumer Services and Healthcare Regulation commission serves as the state survey agency for both state licensing and federal Medicare and Medicaid certification. It maintains what it calls Facility Consumer Reports, searchable through a public map viewer on the department's website.

Each consumer report gives you the facility's location, contact information, the administrators of record, the services the facility is licensed to provide, and its survey history. The administrator field alone is worth the visit. If a community has cycled through three administrators in two years, that is a fact about the building that no tour will volunteer.

Reports are published for hospitals, hospice agencies, home health agencies, nursing homes (which Indiana licenses as comprehensive care facilities), ambulatory surgery centers, dialysis clinics, intermediate care facilities for individuals with intellectual disabilities, and — the one that matters most to families touring assisted living — residential care facilities. RCF is Indiana's license category for assisted-living-type communities, governed by 410 IAC 16.2-5. If a community in Carmel or Greenwood or Broad Ripple holds an RCF license, it has a consumer report.

Complaint investigation results land in the same place. When IDOH investigates a complaint against a facility, the findings are posted to that public viewer once the investigation closes. So the file is not just routine inspections — it is the accumulated paper trail of everything anyone reported and the state substantiated.

Medicare's Care Compare Will Not Help You Here

Families who have been through a nursing home search before tend to reach for Medicare's Care Compare tool and its five-star ratings. That instinct is correct for nursing homes and wrong for everything else you are likely looking at.

Care Compare covers hospitals, clinicians, home health agencies, nursing homes, and dialysis facilities. Assisted living is not on it. There is no federal star rating for a residential care facility anywhere in the country, because assisted living is licensed by states and is not a Medicare-certified category. Any website showing you a star rating for an Indiana assisted living community made that rating up, aggregated it from reviews, or sold the placement.

This is the single most common misunderstanding we run into. A family will say a community is "four stars" and mean a lead-generation directory's internal score. If your parent is heading to a nursing home for long-term care, use Care Compare and use it hard. If they are heading to assisted living, the IDOH consumer report is the closest thing to an objective record that exists, and you should read it instead.

The Exemption That Makes Some Buildings Invisible

Here is the part that trips people up, and it is worth understanding before you conclude a community has a clean record.

Not every senior living building in Indiana holds an RCF license. Under 410 IAC 16.2-5-0.5(c), a community that provides only room, board, housekeeping and activities — without administering medication and without providing nursing care — is not required to be licensed as a residential care facility. That covers a lot of independent living. It also covers some buildings that market themselves in language that sounds a great deal like assisted living.

If a community is not licensed, there is no consumer report, no survey history, and no state surveyor who has ever walked the halls. An empty search result does not mean a spotless record. It means the state has never looked, and has no obligation to.

So the search is a two-step. Find out whether the community is licensed at all, then read what the license file says. If a salesperson cannot tell you plainly which license the building holds, treat that as the answer. Our page on verifying an Indiana facility license walks through the same check in more detail.

How to Read a Survey History Without Panicking

The first time most people open a survey history, they see deficiency citations and assume the worst. Some perspective helps.

Almost every facility that has been surveyed has been cited for something. Surveyors are checking compliance against a long rule set, and buildings with residents in them generate findings. A facility with zero citations across several years is more likely to be newly licensed than immaculate.

What you want to read is the shape of the record, not the count. Ask three things. Are the findings clustered around resident care — medication administration, supervision, responding to changes in condition — or around paperwork and building systems? Do the same findings repeat survey after survey, which suggests a correction that did not hold? And what happened after: did the facility submit a plan of correction and clear it, or did the issue escalate?

Repeat findings in the same care area are the signal. One dietary citation in 2024 is noise. Three medication-administration findings across three consecutive visits is a staffing problem the building has not solved, and it is exactly the kind of thing a tour is designed to keep you from noticing.

Bring what you find to the tour. Not as an accusation — as a question. "I read the state report from last year and saw a finding about medication passes. What changed?" A good executive director will answer that directly and tell you what they fixed. An evasive answer is itself data.

If You Need to File a Complaint Yourself

IDOH receives complaints against nursing homes, comprehensive residential care providers, hospitals, ICF-IID group homes, home health agencies, hospice agencies, dialysis clinics, ambulatory surgical centers and birthing centers.

File online, not by phone. IDOH says so itself. The online complaint form is the department's recommended route, and it lets you upload documents, photos or video. The phone line — 1-800-246-8909 — takes a voicemail, and the department explicitly recommends against using it unless you have no way to use the internet or email. Most complaints are detailed, and detail does not survive a voicemail.

Complaints that do not contain enough information can be closed without action, so write it properly the first time. Include the facility's name and address, the date and time of the incident or how often it recurs, the names of everyone involved, room numbers or the specific location inside the building, any injuries, whether you believe this was a one-time event or a pattern, whether the facility has tried to address it, and what other agencies you have contacted. If you believe someone is in immediate danger, say so in those words — immediate jeopardy triggers a faster response.

You can file anonymously, but understand the trade: IDOH then cannot contact you for more information or tell you what it found. If you do give your name, state law protects it. IDOH cannot identify or release the person who filed a complaint.

Then comes the waiting, and it is worth knowing the shape of it in advance. You get an email confirming receipt within three business days. A surveyor enters the facility without advance notice — facilities are not warned about complaint investigations. IDOH asks you to allow up to 120 days for the investigation to complete, and staff cannot give you a status update partway through. You get the findings by email at the end, and they are posted publicly along with everything else.

Who Else to Call, and When

IDOH is the right call for a licensing violation — something the facility did or failed to do that breaks a rule. It is not the right call for everything.

For a resident's rights, a transfer or discharge you think is improper, a billing dispute inside the community, or a problem you would rather resolve than escalate, call the Long-Term Care Ombudsman first. The statewide line is 1-800-622-4484. In Marion County the program is operated regionally by Indiana Legal Services at 317-631-9424. Ombudsmen advocate for the resident, work inside the building, and often fix things in a week that a complaint investigation would take four months to document. Our guide to the Indiana ombudsman program covers what they can and cannot do.

For suspected abuse, neglect or exploitation of an endangered adult, call Adult Protective Services at 1-800-992-6978. APS investigates harm to a person. IDOH investigates a facility's compliance. Serious situations often warrant both, and there is no rule against filing with both.

For a deceptive sales practice — a contract term misrepresented, a fee that appeared after the fact, a marketing claim about care levels the building cannot deliver — the Indiana Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division takes complaints at 1-800-382-1039.

And if you believe a crime has been committed, call local law enforcement. IDOH says this plainly on its own complaint page, and it is the right order of operations.

The Twenty Minutes That Change a Tour

Pulling the consumer reports on your three finalists takes about twenty minutes. It will not tell you whether your mother will be happy in a building. Nothing on the internet will tell you that. It will tell you what the state found the last time it looked, which administrators have run the place, and whether the problems there are the kind that get fixed.

Do it before the tour, not after. Walking in with one specific, calmly asked question about the actual record changes the entire conversation — you stop being a prospect and start being someone who has done the reading. Sales scripts do not have a good answer for that, and the communities worth your parent's money do not need one.

If you want a second set of eyes on what you find, that is what we do, and it does not cost you anything. Our directory of central Indiana communities is a starting point, not a substitute for the state's file.

Talk to a local advisor about your situation →