Switch Connect is an API that delivers your Switch labor data in near real time, already in the form and shape PBJ reporting requires. Correct job codes, correct dates, correct pay type — so the hours you staffed through Switch don’t have to be reshaped from invoices at quarter-end.
To be clear about what it covers: Switch Connect carries the hours Switch providers worked in your building. It isn’t a whole-building PBJ feed, and it doesn’t touch the hours your employed staff work. You file those the way you always have. What it removes is the part of the file that most often goes wrong.
Why contract hours are the part that breaks
Employee hours come out of one payroll system and are usually clean. Contract and per diem hours arrive from several sources in different formats, and someone maps each name to a job code and pay type at quarter-end, on a deadline. Three things go wrong there, reliably:
- Hours that never make the file. Coverage you staffed and paid for, missing from the submission — and therefore missing from every measure computed on it.
- Role and date mismatches. A clinician coded to the wrong category, or a shift crossing midnight attributed to the wrong day.
- Employee IDs that drift between quarters. CMS tracks people by the employee system ID you report. When a returning clinician arrives under a new ID, they read as a new person — and a facility showing 100% daily turnover on any single day is excluded from the nurse turnover measures entirely.
Switch Connect removes the translation step for the Switch portion of your file, and every provider arrives under one persistent provider ID that never changes — the same identifier on every shift, in every building, every quarter. That’s what makes continuity visible in the only data CMS actually reads.
Near real time, not quarter-end
PBJ is due 45 days after a quarter closes, and updated ratings post to Care Compare about a month after that (CMS Five-Star Technical Users’ Guide, July 2026 edition). By the time a reporting error surfaces publicly, it describes a quarter you finished two and a half months ago.
A live feed changes what you can catch. Coverage gaps, role coding, and hours that aren’t landing where you expect become visible while the quarter is still open — which is the only point at which any of it is still fixable.
How access works
Switch Connect isn’t self-service, deliberately. We create the API key and scope it to your facility and its permissions, which is what makes it impossible for a key to be pointed at another building’s data.
We’re rolling Switch Connect out to facilities now. Register your interest below and we’ll come back to you when we’re setting up your building — and if you work with a PBJ vendor or payroll system that would consume the feed, say which one. It shapes the order we roll people out in.
Switch Connect is available to facilities already working with Switch. If you’re evaluating Switch and want to see what the data side looks like before you commit, start with a conversation about coverage — Connect comes with the relationship rather than separately from it.
What the data feeds
The reason any of this matters is that PBJ isn’t a filing chore sitting beside your staffing rating. It is the staffing rating — all six measures are computed from what you submit, with no separate survey and no chance to explain a bad quarter afterward.
Worth understanding in full: how the CMS Five-Star staffing score actually works, how CMS calculates nursing home turnover — including why your agency clinicians count toward it — and what else Switch can do for your PBJ reporting. To see where your building currently scores, the staffing star calculator returns your exact score out of 380.