CMS Provider Facilities Scraper (Medicare)

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🎯 What this scrapes

The CMS Provider Data Catalog (data.cms.gov/provider-data) is the federal government's authoritative directory of every Medicare-certified healthcare facility in the country — nursing homes, hospitals, home health agencies, and hospices — complete with address, phone, ownership, staffing, and the CMS 1-5 star quality ratings that drive Medicare's own "Care Compare" tool.

The catalog's own datastore-query API is public, but turning it into a reliable bulk export takes real engineering: each facility type publishes a different column set (a hospital record and a nursing-home record share almost no field names), the national datasets run past 450 000 rows, and a naive client either downloads entire CSVs or has to reverse-engineer the datastore's bracketed conditions[] filter syntax to query server-side. We did that reverse-engineering, curated four facility datasets behind one friendly dataset input, and hand you back one richly-typed row per facility — core columns normalised, everything else preserved in a typed extras map.

Sales teams, ESG analysts, and healthcare-data resellers currently stitch this together from 25+ single-dataset scrapers or hand-rolled CSV downloads. This Actor unifies all four facility types behind one input schema, with server-side state/city filtering so you never pay to transfer rows you didn't ask for.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🔁 Real limit/offset pagination — the datastore API caps nothing on paper, but we page in bounded 500-row chunks and stop exactly when the server-reported match count is reached, so a broad query doesn't run away.
• 🛡️ Retry with exponential backoff — on 408 / 429 / 5xx we back off (2s → 30s, capped) and honour Retry-After, up to 5 attempts per page, before surfacing an error.
• 🧊 Per-item fault isolation — one malformed record in a page of 500 is logged and skipped; it never sinks the rest of the page.
• 🧱 Pydantic-validated rows — a stable core (CCN, name, address, city, state, ZIP, phone) plus a typed extras map for every dataset-specific column (star ratings, ownership, bed counts, services offered). Nothing degrades to a bare, untyped dict.
• 🌐 Proxy-ready — data.cms.gov is a public federal endpoint and direct routing works on most infrastructure; the Apify Proxy field is there when your network needs it.
• 💰 You pay only for results that land. No data → no charge beyond the small run warm-up fee.

💡 Use cases

• Healthcare vendor sales lists — pull every nursing home or hospital in a state for a targeted outreach or prospecting list.
• ESG / site-diligence screening — check quality ratings, ownership type, and inspection history before an acquisition or partnership.
• Compliance & referral-network products — bulk-export by facility type and resell structured datasets to billing, credentialing, or referral tools.
• Journalism & policy research — analyze facility quality, ownership concentration, or staffing trends by state.
• Competitive intelligence — track how a chain's facilities rank across the CMS star-rating system.
• Home health / hospice referral sourcing — build a state-scoped directory of agencies with services offered and quality scores.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free — no credit card required.
2. Pick a dataset: nursing_homes, hospitals, home_health_agencies, or hospices.
3. Optionally set state and/or city — both are filtered server-side by CMS, so narrower is cheaper.
4. Set maxResults — default 100, hard cap 5000 per run.
5. Click Start. Results stream into the dataset in real time.
6. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
dataset	string	no	nursing_homes	nursing_homes, hospitals, home_health_agencies, or hospices.
state	string	no	—	2-letter state code (CA, NY, TX …). Filtered server-side by CMS.
city	string	no	—	City name within the chosen state, filtered server-side.
maxResults	integer	no	100	Max facility records to return (1–5000).
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{"useApifyProxy": false}	Apify Proxy settings. Direct routing works for data.cms.gov on most infrastructure.

Example input

{
  "dataset": "nursing_homes",
  "state": "CA",
  "maxResults": 100,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one CMS-certified facility record. Dataset-specific columns (star ratings, ownership, services, staffing) live in extras, keyed by their raw CMS field name.

Field	Type	Notes
dataset	string	Which curated dataset this record came from.
ccn	string	CMS Certification Number (or CMS facility ID for hospitals).
name	string	Facility legal/display name.
address	string | null	Street address.
city	string | null	City.
state	string | null	2-letter state code.
zip_code	string | null	ZIP code.
phone	string | null	Telephone number.
extras	object	Every dataset-specific column (ratings, ownership, bed counts, services …), string-valued or null.
scraped_at	string	When this row was recorded (ISO-8601 UTC).

Example output

{
  "dataset": "nursing_homes",
  "ccn": "015009",
  "name": "BURNS NURSING HOME, INC.",
  "address": "701 MONROE STREET NW",
  "city": "RUSSELLVILLE",
  "state": "AL",
  "zip_code": "35653",
  "phone": "2563324110",
  "extras": {
    "overall_rating": "2",
    "ownership_type": "For profit - Corporation",
    "number_of_certified_beds": "57"
  },
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-26T00:00:00+00:00"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you only pay when these events fire:

Event	USD	What triggers it
actor-start	$0.20	One-off warm-up charge per run
result-row	$0.004	Per facility record written to the dataset

Example: 1 000 facility records at the rates above = $4.00 plus the $0.20 run warm-up. No subscription, no minimum, no card required to start — Apify gives every new account free credit.

🚧 Limitations

• Column sets differ per dataset — a hospital record and a nursing-home record share almost no raw field names. The stable core (CCN, name, address, city, state, ZIP, phone) is normalised; everything else lands in extras under its original CMS field name, which varies by dataset.
• No email addresses — the Provider Data Catalog does not publish facility email addresses. Phone is included; email is not part of the public catalog.
• US facilities only — the catalog covers Medicare-certified US facilities. International facilities are out of scope.
• Data freshness — CMS refreshes each dataset on its own cadence (often quarterly for quality ratings). The scraped_at field marks when the Actor pulled it, not when CMS last updated the underlying record.
• 5000-result hard cap per run — for a full-state pull larger than that, split by city or run multiple jobs and merge the datasets.

❓ FAQ

Is this data public and legal to use?

Yes. The CMS Provider Data Catalog is a public federal dataset maintained by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, published under an open-data policy with no restrictions on use. This Actor queries the public datastore-query API documented at data.cms.gov/provider-data.

Why do the columns look different for hospitals vs. nursing homes?

CMS publishes each facility type as an independently maintained dataset with its own column set — a byproduct of decades of separate reporting programs (Nursing Home Compare, Hospital Compare, Home Health Compare, Hospice Compare) being consolidated under one catalog. This Actor normalises the columns every dataset shares (name, address, city, state, ZIP, phone) and preserves the rest in extras exactly as CMS names them.

How current is the data?

It depends on the dataset — CMS refreshes nursing-home and hospital quality ratings roughly quarterly; core facility listing data (address, phone) updates more often. Every dataset carries a processing_date-style field inside extras when CMS publishes one.

Can I filter by ZIP code or facility name?

Not server-side today — the datastore-query API's server-side filtering is verified for state and city. Filter by ZIP or name in your own pipeline after export, or open a feature request.

What does the CMS star rating mean?

CMS assigns a 1-5 star overall_rating (and category sub-ratings for health inspections, staffing, and quality measures) to nursing homes as part of its public Care Compare program. This Actor surfaces those ratings unmodified inside extras for the nursing_homes dataset.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, need a new facility dataset added, or want ZIP-code filtering built in? Open an issue on the Issues tab in Apify Console — we read every report and ship fixes weekly.

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🔗 Related Devil Scrapes Actors

Building a healthcare dataset? This sibling pulls individual provider records from the same federal agency:

• NPI Healthcare Provider Scraper (NPPES) — individual doctors, dentists, and specialists from the CMS NPI registry

Browse the full fleet at apify.com/DevilScrapes.