Public data endpoints

CareRanks publishes the structured data behind its pages as static JSON — free to use with attribution. Everything derives from public federal sources (CMS); quality figures are CMS values verbatim, and prices are parsed from each hospital's own federally required machine-readable file, never estimated.

Keys and lookup

Facilities are keyed by CMS Certification Number (CCN), a 6-character identifier (example: 070022 is Yale New Haven Hospital). To find a CCN, start from the search index below, follow the profile URL, and use the same CCN that appears in that profile's data links. Profile URLs follow /hospitals/{state}/{slug}/.

Search index

GET /search-index.json

Every hospital as {n: name, c: city, s: state, r: star rating, u: profile URL}. Use it for name/city/state lookup. Health-system hubs are appended as {n: name, u: hub URL, y: "sys", f: facility count} — filter on y if you want hospitals only.

Payer-negotiated rates

GET /payer-data/{ccn}.json

Median payer-negotiated dollar rates by MS-DRG, parsed from the hospital's published price file: {"470": [["Aetna", 38712.50], ["Cigna", 41220.00]]} — DRG code mapped to an array of [payer name, median negotiated rate]. Only dollar-denominated rates appear; percentage and algorithm-based entries are excluded rather than estimated. Not every hospital has a shard — absence means we could not parse a usable price file for that CCN.

Clinician rosters

GET /clinician-data/{ccn}.json

{d: refresh date, c: [clinicians]}. Each clinician: n (NPI), l/f/m (last/first/middle), c (credential), s (specialty), t/a (telehealth / accepts Medicare assignment), and optionally u — Medicare fee-for-service procedure volumes as [category, count, national percentile] where count may be CMS's suppression range "1-10" — and p — CMS Open Payments as [payment count, total USD, top category]. Volumes cover all practice locations, not just this hospital.

Markdown page versions

Hospital profiles, hospital pricing tables, and procedure hubs are also published as plain markdown. Two ways to get them: append index.md to the page URL (/hospitals/ct/yale-new-haven-hospital/index.md), or request the HTML URL with an Accept: text/markdown header — the server returns the markdown twin with Content-Type: text/markdown. Pages with a twin advertise it via a Link: rel="alternate" header.

In-page tools (WebMCP)

For agent-capable browsers, every page registers three tools via the emerging navigator.modelContext API: search_hospitals (name/city/state lookup), get_hospital_prices (payer-negotiated rates by CCN and MS-DRG), and get_hospital_clinicians (roster with Medicare volumes and Open Payments). Each wraps the static JSON endpoints above, so non-WebMCP agents lose nothing by calling the endpoints directly.

Remote MCP server

A read-only Model Context Protocol server runs at POST https://careranks.com/mcp (stateless Streamable HTTP, no auth, protocol revisions 2025-03-26 through 2025-11-25; newer-revision version headers are tolerated best-effort). Five tools: search_facilities (all 41K+ facilities and health systems), get_facility, get_hospital_prices (payer-negotiated rates by CCN and MS-DRG), get_hospital_clinicians (filterable roster), and get_facility_profile (structured summary plus bounded markdown for hospitals). Every tool is a projection over the static endpoints above. Connect it in any MCP client as a remote HTTP server; responses include structuredContent. Usage is counted per tool call, and fetches of the machine-readable surfaces on this page (markdown twins, JSON endpoints, llms.txt) are counted the same way — bounded classifications only: no IPs, no payloads, no identifiers. The endpoint can be disabled without affecting the rest of the site.

Facility index

/agent-data/facility-index.json — one ~4.5 MB JSON file covering every hospital, nursing home, home-health agency, dialysis center, and health system: type, id (CMS CCN for facilities), name, city, state, star rating, profile URL, and capability flags (md markdown twin, p payer rates, cl clinician roster — flags reflect files that actually exist in this build). This is the index the MCP server searches.

Discovery

Terms

Free for research, journalism, and AI-agent use with attribution to CareRanks (careranks.com). Endpoints are static files refreshed with each site build. The data is decision support, not medical advice; underlying sources are CMS and other federal publications. For bulk or commercial licensing, see about for contact details.