How to Use a Hospital Star Ratings API (CMS Care Compare)

#healthcare #api #data #opendata

What are CMS hospital star ratings?

CMS publishes overall hospital star ratings and facility attributes through Care Compare / the Provider Data Catalog. The primary machine-readable source for facility-level general information (including overall rating) is the Hospital General Information dataset on data.cms.gov/provider-data (dataset id xubh-q36u).

There is no separate “secret” star-ratings product — the stars are fields on the public Provider Data Catalog tables.

Official API pattern (high level)

Call the Provider Data Catalog datastore query endpoint for xubh-q36u.
Filter with conditions such as state, citytown, hospital_type, or hospital_ownership.
Read hospital_overall_rating (and related facility fields) from each result row.
Optionally filter client-side for minimum rating or emergency-services flags when the catalog does not support that operator server-side.

Ready-made JSON options

Apify Actor (free): CMS Hospital Quality / Care Compare Scraper
HTTP API: CMS Healthcare Data API on Zyla — GET /v1/hospital-quality

Example Apify input

{
  "state": "RI",
  "minOverallRating": 3,
  "emergencyServicesOnly": true,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example Zyla-style query

GET /v1/hospital-quality?state=RI&minOverallRating=3&limit=25

What you get back

Typical cleaned fields include CCN / facility id, facility name, address, city, state, hospital type, ownership, emergency services flag, and overall star rating.

Use cases

Payer network adequacy and quality dashboards
Journalists comparing hospitals by state
PE / diligence screening of acute-care facilities
AI agents that need structured Care Compare JSON

Nursing homes have a separate Care Compare provider-info table — see CMS Nursing Home Care Compare Scraper.
Physician payments: CMS Open Payments Scraper.

Disclaimer

Public CMS data only. Ratings methodologies change; always cite the CMS release you used. Not medical or legal advice.

Disclosure: Theta Tech built the free Apify Actors and the CMS Healthcare Data API linked in this article.

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