Microproduct data guidebeginner

CMS Hospital General Information

Medicare-registered hospital locations, characteristics, services, and ratings for building provider comparison and access tools.

Start the guide Open official source

At a glance

Difficulty
Beginner — comfortable for a first prototype
Size
Small · ≤0.1 GB
Formats
JSON, CSV
Access
API or Download
API key
Not required
Provider
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
Updates
Monthly
Data terms
CMS public-data principles

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

Hospital General Information lists Medicare-registered hospitals with addresses, ownership, services, and overall ratings. Start with one state and the stable dataset identifier. Ratings may be absent or not comparable across facility types, and addresses are not a measure of service access.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An internet connection
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Open the dataset overview and read the current data dictionary.
  2. 2.Query the stable dataset identifier for a bounded page of hospital records.
  3. 3.Preserve Facility ID values and the release date when comparing future versions.
Open official source
3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/api/1/datastore/query/xubh-q36u/0",
    params={"limit": 100},
    timeout=30,
)
response.raise_for_status()
hospitals = pd.DataFrame(response.json()["results"])
sample = hospitals[hospitals["state"] == "CA"]
print(sample[["facility_id", "facility_name", "hospital_type", "hospital_overall_rating"]].head(20))
4

Test a useful signal

Compare hospitals within one state

Summarize hospital types, ownership, emergency services, and reported ratings in California.

  1. 01Filter records by state while preserving Facility ID as text.
  2. 02Summarize hospital type and ownership and report rating missingness before comparing values.
  3. 03Explain why facility type, missing ratings, release timing, and geographic access limit the comparison.

Dataset details

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-13. Temporal coverage: current provider records with archived releases.

Theme

Health, Food & Safety

Domains

Health CareHealth Services

Data types

TabularGeospatial

Tasks

Provider ComparisonGeographic AnalysisMarket Research

Geography

United States

Formats

JSONCSV

Provider

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

Data terms

CMS public-data principles