Health Care Services Data: Facility Quality, Payment Transparency, Shortage Geography and Cross-Country Health Panels · Head-to-head
Medicare Care Compare vs Open Payments: Facility Grades or Payment Trails
Which health care services data: facility quality, payment transparency, shortage geography and cross-country health panels data fits your job: Medicare Care Compare, or Open Payments. API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.
Medicare Care Compare (Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Home Health, Dialysis)
Open Payments (Physician Payments Sunshine Act)
Where the fields line up
No shared field names. These two answer different questions.
| Field | Medicare Care Compare | Open Payments |
|---|---|---|
facility_id | CMS Certification Number (CCN) identifying the facility - the single join key across all four program files. | not in this set |
facility_name | Registered name of the Medicare-certified facility. | not in this set |
address | Street address of the facility. | not in this set |
city_town | City or town where the facility is located. | not in this set |
state | Two-letter US state or territory code. | not in this set |
zip_code | Five-digit postal ZIP code. | not in this set |
county_parish | County or parish name. | not in this set |
telephone_number | Facility contact phone number. | not in this set |
hospital_type | Hospital category: acute care, critical access, psychiatric, children's, acute care Veterans Administration, rural emergency hospital. | not in this set |
hospital_ownership | Ownership model such as government hospital district or authority, voluntary non-profit, proprietary. | not in this set |
emergency_services | Whether the hospital operates an emergency department (Yes/No). | not in this set |
hospital_overall_rating | Overall star rating from 1 to 5 summarizing hospital performance across measure groups; 'Not Available' when insufficient data. | not in this set |
Coverage, side by side
| Medicare Care Compare | Open Payments | |
|---|---|---|
| Geographic | All 50 US states, DC and territories; one row per Medicare-certified facility nationwide | United States and territories by recipient business address, plus travel destinations worldwide |
| Temporal | Current-state snapshots, with full archived databases back to 2019 | Program years 2019-2025 in detail, plus all-years summary tables; earlier years are not part of the current release family |
| Granularity | Facility level, one row per CCN, with national and state companion files | One row per aggregated payment or transfer of value; pre-aggregated views by recipient, payer, state and specialty |
What each contains
Pick by fit, not by loyalty.
| Medicare Care Compare | Open Payments | |
|---|---|---|
| Geography | All 50 US states, DC and territories; one row per Medicare-certified facility nationwide | United States and territories by recipient business address, plus travel destinations worldwide |
| Temporal reach | Current-state snapshots, with full archived databases back to 2019 | Program years 2019-2025 in detail, plus all-years summary tables; earlier years are not part of the current release family |
| Granularity | Facility level, one row per CCN, with national and state companion files | One row per aggregated payment or transfer of value; pre-aggregated views by recipient, payer, state and specialty |
| Scale | ~5,400 hospitals, ~14,700 nursing homes, ~12,500 home health agencies, ~7,500 dialysis facilities; nursing home file spans 99 columns | 74 cataloged datasets; 15,498,687 rows by 91 columns in the 2024 General Payments file |
| Unit of judgement | A 1-to-5 star grade per provider type, fed by inspections, staffing and outcome measures | A dollar figure per transfer of value, fed by mandatory manufacturer reports |
Or take both in one feed
They stack cleanly, precisely because CMS maintains both under one identifier system. The natural join is Teaching_Hospital_CCN to Facility ID: a life-science commercial team can sit each teaching hospital's aggregate Open Payments totals next to its Care Compare stars and ownership class, separating high-volume teaching centers from high-rated community systems. Analysts watching chains can go further, comparing payment concentration around for-profit versus nonprofit facilities.
Two practical notes from the records. First, the CCN bridge only carries teaching hospitals - practitioner-level payments have no CCN, and joins at the person level ride the NPI, which Care Compare does not carry. Second, mind the vintage: Care Compare is a rolling current-state snapshot while Open Payments belongs to fixed program years, so anchor any combined analysis on an explicit year rather than assuming point-in-time agreement. Datadory delivers both on your schedule - daily, weekly, or hourly - your call. Or take both in one feed.
API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.
Fair questions
Is Medicare Care Compare better than Open Payments?
Better depends on the deliverable. Care Compare wins on judging providers: 1-to-5 stars across hospitals, nursing homes, home health agencies and dialysis facilities, with inspection scores, staffing hours and fines behind the grades. Open Payments wins on tracing money: 15.5 million product-linked payments a program year, named payers and recipients. Sample both, match each to the question.
Do the two datasets share any identifiers?
Yes - the CMS Certification Number. In Care Compare it arrives as Facility ID on every certified facility; in Open Payments it arrives as Teaching_Hospital_CCN when the recipient is a teaching hospital. That makes facility-level joins possible for teaching centers, while practitioner-level records carry an NPI instead.
Who shows up in Open Payments but never in Care Compare?
Individual practitioners. Care Compare identifies facilities only, never people.
Which dataset is bigger?
Open Payments, by orders of magnitude. Its 2024 General Payments file alone holds 15,498,687 rows across 91 columns, within a 74-dataset catalog spanning program years 2019 through 2025. Care Compare is smaller but denser per subject: roughly 40,000 facilities with the nursing home file alone carrying 99 columns of quality and operating detail.
Can I line up payments against hospital quality?
For teaching hospitals, directly: join Open Payments' Teaching_Hospital_CCN to Care Compare's Facility ID, then read aggregate payment totals against overall star rating, ownership and emergency-services status. For individual physicians there is no direct bridge - their records carry NPI and specialty, fields Care Compare does not include, so those analyses stay within Open Payments itself.
Are the field definitions in these datasets documented?
Both records in Datadory's catalog carry verified field definitions. Care Compare's dictionary covers CCNs, hospital type and ownership enums, star-rating and measure-count columns, staffing hours and fine totals. Open Payments' defines recipient categories, payer entities, payment forms and natures, product and NDC fields, and the dispute, delay and change-type flags.