How to find North Carolina Certificate of Need filings
Where DHSR publishes Certificate of Need records, what each document contains, and how to get the ones that are not online.
Where does North Carolina publish CON filings?
The Healthcare Planning and Certificate of Need Section of DHSR posts decisions on its decisions and findings page, with archive pages for each earlier year. Applications appear on the monthly application logs. The Section also posts appeals filed reports, written comments and public hearing reports.
What does each document tell you?
The application log lists each application as received: HSA, county, project ID, date received, proposed capital expenditure, fee, competitive flag, facility, project type and review cycle. The Required State Agency Findings carry the Agency's analysis and a call on each review criterion of G.S. 131E-183 and the 10A NCAC 14C rules: marked C, CA, NC or NA, where NC means nonconforming. The decision letter gives the decision, the approved capital expenditure, the last date to appeal and the conditions. The appeals filed report gives the petitioner, petition date and reason.
Why is it hard to follow a request from start to finish?
Logs, decisions, comments and appeals sit on separate pages. The logs name the facility, not the legal applicant, and a competitive review puts several applicants in one findings document. DHSR posts no withdrawal list, so an application that leaves the log without a decision just stops appearing. The links to the 2016 to January 2019 logs and the 2016 to 2019 appeals reports are dead, and appeal outcomes are not linked from DHSR at all.
How do I get records that are not online?
Send a public records request to the DHSR CON Section and name the project IDs. In October 2026 the Section answered by email, sent decision letters and stated that it keeps no withdrawn report and no incomplete list. Many of the dead older logs are in the Internet Archive, for example the January 2016 log.
Is there other public data that helps?
Appeals go to the Office of Administrative Hearings, whose ALJ decisions page links a case search form, and then to the Court of Appeals. The Section's no reviews and exemptions page lists projects that did not need review. S.L. 2023-7 took psychiatric and chemical dependency beds out of review and phased out CON for surgery centers and MRI in counties over 125,000 people, so those filings drop after 2023 for legal reasons.
Where does COPN Atlas fit?
COPN Atlas joins those documents into one row per project ID: 1,684 North Carolina projects with IDs from 2016 to 2026. 1,380 were approved with conditions, 274 denied and 7 never went into review; 23 have no decision posted. Each row carries the findings date and analyst, criteria found nonconforming on denials, conditions, written comments, hearings and appeals, with links to DHSR's PDFs. The file adds 81 pending applications from the 2026 logs. See what is in the North Carolina file.
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