Panda Olson of Ham Lake visits her 86-year-old father, Ronald Lund at the White Pine Advanced Memory Care on Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2022. Panda was horrified two years ago when she learned one morning that her father, Ronald Lund, who has dementia, fell from a third-story window at the nursing home where he was living at the time — the Estates of St. Louis Park. He suffered multiple fractures in his spine and a broken rib from the fall. (Richard Tsong-Taatarii, Star Tribune/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Choosing a suitable and safe nursing home for a loved one can be challenging, but there are multiple online tools to find information about specific nursing homes:

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) requires each state to inspect nursing homes that receive federal money. The federal government also uses a five-star quality rating system to rank nursing homes by a variety of measures, including staffing, health inspections and quality of care.

You can get information about the quality of care in every nursing home in the country at the federal government's Nursing Home Compare website at Medicare.gov/nursinghomecompare. The site contains inspection reports for each nursing home as well as the home's star rating under the government's five-star system. The five-star categories assigned to each nursing home range from "Much Above Average" (five stars) to "Much Below Average" (one star).

The Minnesota Department of Health also publishes inspection reports on its website, including those that stem from complaints of unsafe conditions or poor care. You can search for facilities by name and find inspection reports on the Department's website at bit.ly/3RvrIn1.

The state also maintains an online search tool, known as the Nursing Home Report Card. You can compare nursing homes in Minnesota based on a variety of quality measures, such as staff retention, family satisfaction and proportion of single rooms. You also can tailor your search for short- or long-term stays. The Nursing Home Report Card can be accessed at nhreportcard.dhs.mn.gov.

Another useful tool is Nursing Home Inspect,a project of the nonprofit news outlet ProPublica that compiles 80,000 nursing home inspection reports into a searchable database. The site also contains information on the number and severity of deficiencies cited by regulators and the penalties imposed. You can search by city or nursing home name at projects.propublica.org/nursing-homes.