Methodology

Written and reviewed by Erin Rose — healthcare price-transparency analyst. Last checked July 27, 2026.

Every fact on this site — a Medicare fee, a coverage yes/no, a recall count, a product pick — traces to a named primary source below, not to memory or a guess. This page explains exactly how, how often each source gets rechecked, and the honesty rules you'll see applied on the pages themselves.

How we verify Medicare coverage facts

Whether Medicare pays for an item — and how much — comes from four government sources, checked together rather than any one in isolation:

• CMS HCPCS Level II quarterly file (July 2026 release) — confirms a code exists and its official description. HCPCS numbers that look like gaps in a sequence (for example E0115, E0173) are checked against this file first; if a number simply isn't assigned, we say so rather than guessing at what it might mean.
• CMS DMEPOS Fee Schedule (July 2026 release, DME26-C) — the purchase and rental fee ranges quoted everywhere on this site. We compute the national range as the min/max across each state's non-rural ("NR") purchase column, because the fee schedule's own national Ceiling/Floor columns read 0.00 for every DME category we track and aren't usable.
• CMS DMEPOS utilization data, "By Geography and Service" — how many times a code was actually billed nationally, live-fetched from data.cms.gov rather than cached, so a re-check always pulls the current published year. The current published year is DY2024 — the most recent CMS has released as of this July 2026 check. That's roughly an 18-month publication lag behind today's date, which is disclosed on every page that cites a utilization number, not just here.
• CMS Medicare Coverage Database (MCD) DME MAC Policy Articles — the actual coverage rules (prescription requirements, replacement timelines, what a code does and doesn't include), cited by article ID (for example A52503 for walkers) with a direct link to the article on cms.gov.

How we verify recall history

Recall and safety-enforcement records come from the two federal agencies that actually run consumer and device recalls — queried directly, not aggregated through a third-party recall tracker:

• CPSC SaferProducts.gov Recall API — searched by product name (bed rail, walker, rollator, shower chair, lift chair, commode, patient lift, and close variants). No API key is required, and the searches are cheap enough to rerun weekly.
• openFDA Device Recall and Device Enforcement databases — searched with phrase-quoted terms so a search for "bed rail" doesn't silently expand into every record containing "bed" or "rail" separately.

Together those searches currently cover 191 deduplicated records. A record that matches more than one search term (a rollator recall matching both "walker" and "rollator," for instance) is only counted once.

How we verify product picks

Every "verified pick" on a gear page is fetched live against the Amazon Creators API on the date shown next to its price — not pulled from a stock catalog or a manufacturer's marketing page. The ASIN, price, product photo, and fitment specs (weight capacity, handle height, folded width, and similar) all come straight from that listing's own data, stamped with the date it was checked (price_date). Where a listing doesn't publish a spec we need, the page says so directly rather than filling in a typical number.

The honesty rules you'll see in action

These aren't abstractions — they show up as specific sentences on specific pages, because a fact that isn't disclosed this way is a fact an answer engine can misquote.

Absence is not the same as "not covered because it's bad"

When a code shows zero Medicare claims and no fee-schedule entry, we say exactly why, when we know it. The nine bath-safety codes (E0240–E0248 — shower chairs, tub rails, transfer benches) show zero national claims not because CMS overlooked them, but because bath-safety equipment is excluded from the DME benefit category by statute (Social Security Act §1861(s)(6): not "primarily medical in nature"). That's a categorical exclusion, disclosed as one — not silently treated the same as a code CMS simply hasn't gotten around to covering.

"Never searched" is not the same as "searched and clean"

Our recall searches run against a fixed list of product terms. When a product category — cold-therapy machines are the current example — isn't one of those terms, a page says so plainly: the absence of a recall in our data is disclosed as an out-of-scope zero, not a verified-clean record, and readers are told to check CPSC/FDA directly for their specific brand and model before buying secondhand.

Unsourced facts get omitted, not estimated

If a number can't be traced to one of the data files below or a fresh primary-source fetch, it doesn't appear on the page — it's cut, not filled in with a plausible-sounding guess. Earlier drafts of some pages used placeholder price estimates before live product data existed; once real Amazon listings were fetched, those placeholders were replaced and the pages note the correction rather than quietly overwriting it.

The recovery-forum corpus is disclosed as hip-skewed, not knee-verified

Several pages quote recovery-forum posts for color — how people describe using a wedge pillow, whether a reacher actually gets used, whether an ice machine felt necessary. That corpus was built from general lower-extremity joint-replacement threads (BoneSmart, AgingCare), and turned out to be predominantly hip-replacement (THR) content: only 1 of 31 posts actually mentions a knee. Every page that quotes it says so — "predominantly hip/THR-skewed" — rather than presenting hip-replacement commentary as knee-specific consensus. (A planned knee-specific scrape of BoneSmart's TKR forum wasn't run: bonesmart.org/robots.txt explicitly disallows this site's crawler by name, and spoofing past a rule that names it specifically would defeat the point of checking robots.txt at all.)

What this site does not do

VerifiedCareData verifies equipment, cost, and coverage facts. It does not, and will not:

• Give clinical advice. Nothing here tells you whether you should have surgery, when it's safe to bear weight, or how to manage pain or wound care.
• Publish physical-therapy protocols. Exercise routines, range-of-motion targets, and rehab timelines are your surgeon's and physical therapist's call, not this site's.
• Cover medication. Dosing, drug interactions, and pain-management choices aren't addressed here in any form.
• Act as an insurance broker or benefits advisor. We report what Medicare's own published data says a code costs and whether it's billed as DME — we don't sell, recommend, or compare insurance plans, and we don't handle claims on anyone's behalf.

Where a page touches anything close to these lines, it says outright to check with your surgeon, PT, or supplier instead of guessing — see the medical-disclaimer box on the affected pages.

Refresh cadence

Affiliate disclosure

Two places on this site are deliberately kept free of affiliate links, by design, not oversight:

• The Medicare coverage pages (the /recover/*/medicare/ spokes) — never an affiliate link on these pages, full stop. They're the pages most likely to be cited or quoted elsewhere, and credibility on them matters more than any commission they'd generate.
• /dataset.json, the machine-readable dataset — no affiliate parameters, tracking tags, or buy links anywhere in it. It's CC-BY licensed for anyone, human or AI system, to reuse.

About the byline

Erin Rose is a healthcare price-transparency analyst who also works on CareCost, a separate healthcare-cost-estimation project. She reviews and is credited on every page of this site. No clinical credentials are claimed anywhere on this site, because none apply here — the expertise behind this site is in reading and reconciling government pricing, coverage, and safety data, not in medicine.

Found something wrong? Every fact here is meant to be checkable against the source it cites — if one doesn't hold up, tell us and we'll fix it.