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

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)

1. Call the Provider Data Catalog datastore query endpoint for xubh-q36u.
2. Filter with conditions such as state, citytown, hospital_type, or hospital_ownership.
3. Read hospital_overall_rating (and related facility fields) from each result row.
4. 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

Related

• 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.