How CON Signal Works

Certificate of Need Data

A Certificate of Need (CON) is regulatory approval that many states require before a healthcare provider can build a facility, expand capacity, or purchase certain high-cost medical equipment. Approximately 35 states and the District of Columbia operate CON programs.

Each state publishes CON filings differently. Some use weekly or monthly PDF reports, while others publish HTML pages or searchable online databases. CON Signal standardizes these sources into a single, structured record for every filing.

What We Capture

Applicant Information

We record the applicant exactly as published by the state, along with any doing-business-as (DBA) name and the parent health system when it can be identified (for example, HCA Healthcare, Covenant Health, or McLaren Health Care).

Project Details

We classify the project type, including new hospitals, freestanding emergency departments, ambulatory surgery centers, imaging services, radiation therapy facilities, catheterization labs, dialysis centers, and nursing homes.

We also capture key project metrics such as bed counts, operating rooms, treatment stations, and equipment types including MRI, CT, PET, and LINAC systems.

Capital Investment

When available, we record the project’s reported capital cost. Each value includes a confidence score, and estimates derived from letters of intent are clearly marked as estimates.

Status and Timing

We track the filing’s progress through the CON process, including stages such as:

All dates published by the state are retained as part of the record.

Source Verification

Every record links directly to the captured source material and the specific information extracted from it, providing full transparency and traceability.

Alerts

Users can create saved searches using any combination of:

When a newly published filing matches a saved search, an alert is delivered by email the same day the state publishes the filing. You can also point a Slack or webhook destination you control.

Plan

One plan, Premium: $99 a month or $900 a year. It includes every state we cover, one seat, and every feature — live filings, alerts, saved searches, CSV exports, applicant pages, and company profiles.

The public sample (2018–2020) is free to browse. Subscribe for live filings, and cancel anytime from Settings — your account then drops back to the sample.

Data Standards

Public Records Only

All data comes from publicly available government sources. We do not bypass logins or access restrictions. Collection practices respect robots.txt directives, use a clearly identified user agent, and operate at a conservative request rate.

Estimated Costs Are Labeled

Any capital cost obtained from a letter of intent is identified as an estimate and is never presented as a verified project cost.

Verification Warnings

If a reported dollar amount cannot be fully verified against the source text, the filing remains available but is clearly marked with a warning indicating the limitation.

What This Means for Users

CON Signal turns fragmented state-level CON filings into a standardized, searchable dataset. Instead of monitoring dozens of state websites and publication formats, users can track projects, organizations, and markets through a single feed with configurable alerts and documented source verification.