# USCareCheck

> Free reference that puts the US federal government's own records about a hospital or a clinician on one page, in plain language: CMS star ratings, patient surveys and safety measures for every Medicare-certified hospital; NPI registry entry, Medicare practice and federal-exclusion status for every US clinician. Public federal data only - no reviews, no rankings of our own, no paid placement.

USCareCheck (uscarecheck.com) collects public records from CMS, NPPES and the HHS Office of Inspector General, joins them by the identifiers they share (the NPI for people, the CMS certification number for hospitals) and shows them side by side with a short explanation of what each figure means and what it does not. It covers ~5,400 hospitals, ~7.4 million practitioners and ~2 million healthcare organisations, with Medicare practice records for ~1.3 million providers. Every rating or "better / worse than the nation" verdict is CMS's own; the only figures the site derives are sums, shares and medians of the agencies' numbers. Information only - not medical advice, not a credentialing service, and not affiliated with or endorsed by CMS or HHS.

## Key pages
- [Home](https://uscarecheck.com/): check a hospital or a doctor
- [Hospitals](https://uscarecheck.com/hospitals): every Medicare-certified US hospital by state and city, shaded by average CMS star rating; per-state pages such as /hospitals/tx and city pages such as /hospitals/tx/houston
- Hospital page (/hospital/{ccn}/{name}): CMS overall star rating, HCAHPS patient-survey results against state and US averages, deaths / complications / infections / readmissions with CMS's better-no different-worse verdicts, industry payments from drug and device makers (Open Payments) for teaching hospitals, other hospitals nearby
- [Specialties](https://uscarecheck.com/specialties) and [search](https://uscarecheck.com/search): find a practitioner or organisation by name, NPI, specialty, state or city
- Doctor page (/doctor/{npi}/{name}): NPPES registry record (specialties, licence numbers, addresses), Medicare Part B practice for the latest published year (patients, services, what was billed and paid, patient age mix and conditions, against the median for the same provider type), and whether the NPI is on the HHS-OIG exclusion list
- [Sources and methodology](https://uscarecheck.com/sources): each federal dataset, its refresh schedule and when it was last retrieved, the few figures the site computes itself, how records are matched, and the limits of the data
- [About](https://uscarecheck.com/about): what the site is, who runs it, what it deliberately does not do
- [Contact](https://uscarecheck.com/contact): how to reach the site and where to go for questions about a record or your own care
- [Privacy](https://uscarecheck.com/privacy): no accounts, no cookies, no analytics, no third-party requests; ordinary server logs only
- [Terms of use](https://uscarecheck.com/terms)

## How to read the figures
- A hospital's star rating (1-5) is CMS's composite of many quality measures; about four in ten hospitals - psychiatric, children's, long-term care, Rural Emergency and most Critical Access hospitals - receive none.
- "Better / no different / worse than the nation" is CMS's statistical comparison for one measure; "no different" is the most common result.
- Patient-survey percentages are HCAHPS results as published; the state and US averages shown are CMS's.
- Industry payments are as reported by the paying companies under the Sunshine Act; at most teaching hospitals the bulk is research funding and royalties. A payment is disclosure, not a finding.
- A doctor's Medicare figures cover Original Medicare Part B only (not Medicare Advantage, Medicaid or private insurance) and are published about two years in arrears. Volume is not quality.
- The exclusion check matches the OIG list by NPI only; most OIG entries carry no NPI, so "no exclusion under this NPI" is not proof - the OIG's own search is the official record.

## About the data
- NPPES (CMS): provider registry - names, credentials, self-declared specialties, licence numbers, addresses. Public domain.
- CMS Care Compare: hospital star ratings, HCAHPS survey, outcome and infection measures. Checked weekly; CMS publishes quarterly.
- CMS Open Payments: industry payments to teaching hospitals. Checked weekly; published annually.
- CMS Medicare Physician & Other Practitioners (by provider): Medicare Part B utilisation and payment per NPI. Checked weekly; published annually.
- HHS-OIG LEIE: exclusions from federal health programs. Checked weekly; published monthly.