Retrieve hospital star ratings and value-based purchasing (VBP) performance data from CMS Care Compare programmatically using the Provider Data Catalog
Identify the Hospital General Information dataset on data.cms.gov/provider-data which includes the overall hospital star rating alongside facility identifiers and characteristics.
Use the Socrata SODA API to query the dataset, filtering by CCN (Medicare provider number) or state to retrieve ratings for the facilities you need; include $select to project only the fields required.
Retrieve the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Total Performance Score dataset separately, joining it to the general information dataset on the CCN field to combine star ratings with VBP scores.
For VBP domain scores (clinical outcomes, safety, efficiency and cost reduction, person and community engagement), retrieve the measure-level score datasets and aggregate by domain weighting as published in the CMS VBP program specifications.
Cache the retrieved data with the quarter and year of the data vintage, because Care Compare data is updated quarterly and older cached data should be invalidated when a new release is posted.
Use the dataset metadata endpoint to retrieve the last_updated timestamp before downloading; skip full downloads when the metadata indicates no change since your last retrieval.
Known gotchas
Hospital star ratings are calculated on a bell-curve peer comparison methodology that CMS updates periodically; the same raw quality measure scores can produce different star ratings depending on the national peer group distribution in that release quarter.
Some smaller hospitals and specialty hospitals (psychiatric, long-term acute care, cancer hospitals) are excluded from the star rating methodology and will show no overall rating in the dataset.
VBP payment adjustments and publicly reported performance scores are based on different baseline periods; do not assume a high reported performance score directly translates to a positive VBP payment adjustment without checking the applicable baseline year.
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