CMS Open Payments Scraper

Export official U.S. CMS Open Payments general, research, and ownership records. The Actor resolves the matching current dataset from the CMS data catalog, queries first-party JSON, and normalizes high-value professional and payment fields.

What you get

• General, research, or ownership payment records for a selected program year
• Recipient identifiers and names, submitting organization, amount, date, nature, and product context
• Current dataset resolution from CMS catalog metadata instead of a brittle fixed resource ID
• Data-minimized output that deliberately omits recipient street addresses

Output fields

Typical fields include record_id, payment_type, program_year, covered_recipient_npi, recipient name and specialty, submitting organization, total_amount_of_payment_usdollars, date_of_payment, payment nature, product fields, dispute status, source_url, and source.

Example output

{"record_id":"10001","payment_type":"general","program_year":2025,"covered_recipient_npi":"1234567890","covered_recipient_first_name":"Alex","covered_recipient_last_name":"Morgan","total_amount_of_payment_usdollars":"125.00","date_of_payment":"2025-03-04","source_url":"https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov"}

Input parameters

Parameter	Description
paymentType	Select general, research, or ownership.
year	CMS Open Payments program year.
offset	Number of matching source rows to skip.
maxResults	Maximum payment records saved and charged.

Use cases

Healthcare transparency dashboards, payment-category analysis, research-funding review, manufacturer and recipient analysis, annual archives, newsroom investigations, and CMS release monitoring.

Limitations

Open Payments records are disclosures, not findings of misconduct. Dataset names and schemas can change by release. Payment families have different meanings and should not be summed without context. The Actor omits street-address fields and does not profile, score, or make allegations about recipients.

Compared to alternatives

CMS Open Payments data is also available through CMS's own search portal and through general-purpose scrapers that mirror that search UI. This Actor instead resolves the current dataset directly from CMS's published data catalog, so a scheduled run keeps working even after CMS rotates which release is "current" — a common source of silent breakage for tools pointed at a fixed, hardcoded dataset ID. Output is normalized into consistent field names across general, research, and ownership record types, and recipient street addresses are omitted by default to reduce unnecessary exposure of personal data.

FAQ

Does this use the official CMS source? Yes. It resolves and queries CMS-published catalog resources.

Why are addresses excluded? They are unnecessary for the supported transparency analyses and omitting them reduces privacy exposure.

Open the input form or review recent runs.

Confirm material conclusions against the official record and appropriate expertise. This independent Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by CMS.

Last verified: 2026-07