About this site
VerifiedCareData helps older adults and the people who care for them pick mobility and bathroom-safety gear for home: walkers, shower chairs, raised toilet seats and more. We also keep short gear checklists for common surgeries. No brand pays to be picked.
Who writes it
VerifiedCareData is an independent publisher. We build the product, recall and Medicare datasets this site runs on, and check every recommendation against them before it ships. See how we check.
No one here is a clinician, and this site never pretends otherwise. It publishes equipment, cost and coverage facts. It does not tell you whether to have surgery, when it is safe to bear weight, how to manage pain, or anything about medication — those belong to your surgeon and your physical therapist, and the pages say so where the line gets close.
Think we got something wrong? Report an error. Corrections get noted on the page, not quietly overwritten.
How we know what we know
There is no hands-on product testing on this site, and we do not claim any. Instead, every recommendation rests on two kinds of evidence. You can check each one with a link.
Government data and maker spec sheets
What Medicare actually pays, and whether it pays at all. We use the CMS DMEPOS fee schedule, the HCPCS Level II quarterly file, national utilization by code, DME MAC policy articles, and the PDAC product-classification list — queried directly from CMS, never through a third party's summary. Product facts such as size, weight and weight limit come from FDA records and the maker's own spec sheet.
Named hospital instructions
What hospitals actually send patients home with. Every clinical claim on a page quotes a named institution's own discharge instructions or patient-education material — UNC Otolaryngology, Memorial Hermann, UC Davis and others — and links to it. Where sources disagree, the page says they disagree rather than picking one.
Neither source is enough alone. Medicare data tells you what is covered but not what helps. Hospital instructions tell you what is clinically sensible but name almost no products. A recommendation has to fit both.
What we will not do
- No clinical advice. No weight-bearing timelines, no rehab protocols, no wound care, no medication.
- No star ratings or scores. A number invented by us is not evidence.
- No paid placement, ever. No brand has paid to appear here and none can.
- No invented facts. If a number cannot be traced to a source on the page, it gets cut rather than estimated. Where we know a gap exists, the page discloses the gap.
How the site makes money
Some product links are Amazon affiliate links, which pay us a small commission if you buy. That is the whole business model — there is no advertising, no sponsorship, no lead generation, and no data sold.
Three rules keep it from bending the recommendations:
- Coverage pages carry no affiliate links at all. The
/medicare/and/fsa-hsa/pages — the ones people arrive at with money questions — are commercially clean by design, as is every research dataset. - “Borrow it” and “you don't need this” are real answers and appear on the pages, including for items we could have linked.
- Every pick names its own flaw. If we could not find a real one, the pick is not researched enough to publish.
How to check us
The methodology page lists every data source, how often we recheck it, and the rules we follow. The underlying datasets are published under CC BY 4.0 at /research/ — free, no account, no affiliate parameters — so you can check the arithmetic yourself rather than taking our word for it.