How the Radar is built
The Radar answers one commercial question: which healthcare-facility developments deserve a Hampton Roads vendor's attention this week, and what demand do they imply? Everything below exists to make that answer checkable.
Implemented sources
- Virginia Beach commercial permits (public ArcGIS endpoint), filtered for clinical and care-facility work descriptions within a 120-day recency window.
- SAM.gov active Virginia opportunities filtered for hospital, medical, clinic, dental, laboratory, pharmacy, nursing, and behavioral-health terms.
- Virginia Department of Health news feed, filtered for facility, funding, and licensure context — general public-health advisories are screened out.
- Curated official references: the VDH Office of Licensure and Certification and the CHKD newsroom.
Rejected or deferred sources
- Certificate of Public Need (COPN) program pages returned HTTP 404 at every candidate URL during implementation. COPN filings are the richest public signal for hospital expansion, so this is the highest-value deferred source — nothing COPN-related is claimed without it.
- Sentara's newsroom is a JavaScript application shell with no article content in the fetched HTML.
- Riverside Health's newsroom URL returned HTTP 404.
The demand ledger
Every qualifying signal is placed in exactly one lane by its source type: facility construction, institutional procurement, institutional announcements, or regulatory reference. Institution attribution (Sentara, CHKD, VDH, federal buyers) comes from source text only; unnamed commercial filers stay unnamed.
Evidence and confidence
- Every public signal carries its public source link. Confidence labels reflect how directly the source supports the reading.
- No project value, bed count, award amount, patient volume, or vendor demand is invented. Absence is reported as absence, including empty lanes.
Update cadence
The scan runs weekly. Free and paid tiers are generated from the same run, so both always describe the same week. Each free report is dated, archived, and left unchanged.
Public/paid boundary
Public pages carry a sanitized projection: broad summaries with sources, site detail withheld. Paid-grade detail — impact and urgency ranking, per-signal vendor demand, exact site detail, and action guidance — stays in the paid report, enforced by an automated fail-closed check before anything publishes.
Limitations, honestly
- Structured permit coverage currently comes from Virginia Beach's open-data endpoint; Norfolk, Chesapeake, and other cities publish less machine-readable permit data and are not yet included.
- Health-system internal capital plans are not public; this Radar sees them only when they surface as permits, procurement, or announcements.
- Signals extracted from public text can be incomplete; verify against original documents before committing resources.
- Reports are commercial screening intelligence — not medical, legal, procurement, financial, or investment advice.