U.S. nursing homes took a giant step forward yesterday in terms of transparency and accountability with the release of a new Nursing Home search tool on the HHS Medicare site.  The site allows you to search for any nursing home in the US (actually you can select them by state, county, and city) and view key statistics that the Feds collect (through the States) as part of the Medicare funding process.  For example, in a matter of seconds, I was able to find the nursing home my Grandma was in in Blackfoot Idaho and see that 6% of the residents have pressure sores compared with 8% of residents nationally.   I'd mark them down on their use of URLs.  They break Principle No. 4 for Enabling Web Services by using a POST instead of a GET for many of the queries yielding them unlinkable.  Overall, however the site is a winner and will drive better behavior.