HRSA HPSA & MUA Shortage Designation Monitor

Track federal health-care shortage designations — HPSA (Health Professional Shortage Areas) and MUA/MUP (Medically Underserved Areas/Populations) — straight from HRSA's official GeoPortal (HPSA) and Data Warehouse (MUA/MUP). This actor normalizes the three HPSA disciplines plus MUA into one clean row-per-designation, then lets you filter, delta, and roll up so you get an answer instead of a raw dump.

Designations decide real money: HPSA status = Medicare telehealth originating-site reimbursement eligibility, HPSA score drives NHSC loan-repayment and J-1 / Conrad 30 waiver priority, and MUA status gates FQHC / RHC / grant eligibility. When a designation is withdrawn, that funding and eligibility can disappear — so the delta mode is a genuine recurring alert.

Scope and cost — read this first

state is required. There is no default and no hidden nationwide mode, so a run always answers about the states you actually named.

{ "state": "Texas" }

A call with no state is rejected before the run starts — HTTP 400, no compute, no rows, nothing billed. That is deliberate: this field used to carry a schema default, and because Apify injects defaults server-side, anyone who omitted it was quietly answered about one arbitrary state and charged for it on a run that reported SUCCESS. A rejected call is cheaper than a wrong answer.

What a run costs. Billing is pay-per-result at $9.00 per 1,000 rows (about $0.90 per 100 rows), and paid Apify plans get a graduated discount of 20-70% off that. Only rows actually written to the dataset are billed — a run that fails a pre-flight check emits nothing and bills nothing. Set maxResults to put a hard ceiling on any single run.

How many rows to expect. Scope drives the bill, so size it deliberately: a single state returns roughly 500-3,000 HPSA designations depending on discipline. Run one state per run and combine the datasets rather than guessing at a wide scope.

Who it's for

• Telehealth companies — confirm which sites/areas keep Medicare originating-site eligibility (HPSA), catch withdrawals early.
• Physician & locum recruiters / staffing — target high-HPSA-score areas for NHSC loan-repayment and J-1 waiver candidates.
• Rural hospitals & clinics — monitor their own and neighboring designations.
• FQHC / RHC grant writers — MUA/MUP status is a hard eligibility gate; verify before applying.
• Health-equity researchers & GIS teams — clean, normalized, geo-tagged shortage data by state / county / congressional district.

Example input

{
  "designationType": "HPSA",
  "discipline": "Primary Care",
  "state": "Alabama",
  "minScore": 14,
  "ruralStatus": "rural",
  "maxResults": 5000
}

Delta example (newly withdrawn/designated since a date)

{
  "designationType": "all",
  "state": "Texas",
  "sinceDate": "2026-01-01"
}

Rollup example (count + avg score by discipline)

{
  "designationType": "HPSA",
  "discipline": "all",
  "state": "California",
  "rollupBy": "discipline"
}

Rollup availability, changed 2026-10-07, service moved 2026-10-24. HRSA first emptied the HPSA point layers, then retired the whole HealthProfessionalShortageAreas_FS service; HPSA is now read from the HRSA AnalyzerTool service, whose layers do not publish a county-FIPS or congressional-district column either. rollupBy "state" and "discipline" work on every run. "county_fips" works on MUA rows (the bulk datamart publishes it) and is refused with a clear error on HPSA rows rather than returning one group keyed "Unknown". "congressional_district" is refused on both backends — no HRSA source publishes it any more. A refused run bills nothing.

Output fields (one row per designation)

Field	Description
source_id	HRSA HPSA/MUA source id
designation_type	HPSA or MUA
discipline	Primary Care / Mental Health / Dental, or MUA type
name	Designation / service-area name
status	Designated / Withdrawn / Proposed for Withdrawal
score	HPSA score (0-26) or MUA/IMU score (0-100)
designation_date	First designated (YYYY-MM-DD)
last_update_date	Last updated (YYYY-MM-DD)
withdrawal_date	Withdrawn date, if any
rural_status	Rural / Non-Rural
hpsa_type	HPSA facility/area type
designation_population	Population covered
pop_provider_ratio_goal	Target population-to-provider ratio
state, state_fips, county_fips, congressional_district	Geography. county_fips is populated on MUA / bulk-datamart rows and null on HPSA rows (the HPSA ArcGIS layers do not publish it); congressional_district is null on every row since 2026-10-07. Both are listed in fields_unavailable so a null is never mistaken for "this designation has none".
fields_unavailable	Which declared columns are null on this row because the backend that answered does not publish them at all
source_layer	ArcGIS layer id (HPSA perimeter polygons: 2 Dental, 6 Mental Health, 10 Primary Care)
status_change	Delta mode only: newly_designated / newly_withdrawn
data_backend, data_vintage	Which HRSA backend answered the row (arcgis_geoportal or hrsa_data_warehouse_csv) and the bulk file date
run_layers_requested, run_layers_failed, run_complete	Which layers the run asked for, which could not be read, and whether the answer is complete
state_input	The state exactly as you supplied it (e.g. TX), before conversion to HRSA spelling

In rollup mode each row is instead rollup_by, group_key, designation_count, avg_score.

Use from an AI agent: quickstart

The smallest input that returns a real answer. Verified live on 2026-10-05: the run SUCCEEDED and returned 5 rows in about 10 seconds.

{
  "state": "Texas",
  "maxResults": 5
}

Call it through the hosted MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com?tools=malonestar/hrsa-shortage-designation-monitor) or straight over HTTP:

POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/malonestar~hrsa-shortage-designation-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN
Content-Type: application/json

with the JSON above as the body. The response is a JSON array of dataset rows.

What comes back: one row per HPSA or MUA designation. Abbreviated first row from that run (the full row has 23 fields, all described in the output schema):

{
  "source_id": "1481242969",
  "designation_type": "HPSA",
  "discipline": "Primary Care",
  "name": "PARKVIEW RURAL HEALTH CLINIC",
  "status": "Designated",
  "score": 15,
  "designation_date": "2021-12-28",
  "rural_status": "Rural",
  "state": "Texas",
  "county_fips": null,
  "congressional_district": null,
  "fields_unavailable": "county_fips,congressional_district"
}

Read before you conclude anything: status, withdrawal_date and data_vintage.

Input notes for agents

• state takes a full name ("Texas") or a 2-letter code ("TX"), case-insensitive, converted to HRSA's spelling before the query; DC and the territories work too. A value that names no HRSA state or territory fails the run and bills nothing. (Until build 1.1.9, {"state":"TX"} succeeded with 0 rows, which read like "no shortage areas in Texas".)
• MUA/MUP rows come from the HRSA Data Warehouse bulk file (data.hrsa.gov), because the GeoPortal MUA layer no longer publishes state, score or status columns; those rows carry data_backend: hrsa_data_warehouse_csv. Before build 1.1.9 an MUA run failed and an all run silently returned HPSA only.
• Every row carries run_layers_requested, run_layers_failed and run_complete. If run_complete is false, a missing designation is not evidence it does not exist.
• There is no all-states mode; run one state per call.
• designationType is HPSA, MUA or all; discipline is Primary Care, Mental Health, Dental or all. maxResults defaults to 1,000.

Cost: $0.0090 per row at the Free-tier list price (paid plans get a discount), so the example above costs about $0.045. A run that cannot answer fails and bills no rows.

Use as an MCP tool

This actor is callable by AI agents (Claude, Cursor, etc.) via mcp.apify.com. The input and output schemas are fully field-described, so an agent can chain it — e.g. "find newly withdrawn Primary Care HPSAs in Texas since Jan 2026" — and pass the normalized rows straight into a downstream tool.

Coverage

• HPSA: Primary Care, Mental Health, Dental (three feature layers).
• MUA/MUP: Medically Underserved Areas & Populations.
• Data is national; filter by state to keep runs fast. Source: HRSA GeoPortal (gisportal.hrsa.gov), keyless. WKID 4326.
• HPSA source service moved 2026-10-24. HRSA retired every child layer of Shortage/HealthProfessionalShortageAreas_FS; HPSA now comes from AnalyzerTool/AnalyzerTool on the same host (layers 1/2/3 = Primary Care / Mental Health / Dental). Verified same dataset and same grain: Alabama returned 84 Primary Care and 25 Mental Health designations on both the old and new service, with national counts 3,921 / 2,150 / 3,188 against the retired layers' 3,909 / 2,133 / 3,176. The new service is refreshed daily (designation updates through 2026-10-22 at the time of the move). No output field changed.

FAQ

How do I get an HPSA shortage designation dataset / API? Set designationType: "HPSA" and a state; this actor returns normalized HPSA rows with scores and dates.

How do I find newly withdrawn HPSA or MUA designations? Use delta mode: set sinceDate (e.g. 2026-01-01). Rows come back with status_change = newly_withdrawn or newly_designated.

Which areas qualify for Medicare telehealth originating-site reimbursement? Areas with an active HPSA designation; filter status: "Designated" and your state.

How do I find high-score HPSA areas for NHSC loan repayment or J-1 waivers? Set minScore (e.g. 14+) — higher HPSA scores get funding/priority.

Is a place a Medically Underserved Area (MUA/MUP)? Set designationType: "MUA" and your state; MUA status gates FQHC/RHC eligibility.

Can I count shortage areas by state or discipline? Yes — set rollupBy to state or discipline for counts + average score. county_fips works on MUA rows only, and congressional_district is no longer answerable (see the rollup note above); either is refused with an explanatory error rather than answered wrongly, and a refused run bills nothing.

Notes

• Billing is a single automatic result event (per dataset item).
• Data is refreshed by HRSA; this actor always reads the live feed.