How the HealthcareDiscovery.AI doctor directory is built, where every number comes from, and what it does and does not mean.
This directory is assembled entirely from federal public records. Nothing on it is submitted by providers, paid for, or ranked by us. This page explains each source, how figures are calculated, and where the limits are.
Provider records
Provider names, credentials, practice city and state, phone numbers and specialty come from the NPPES registry (National Plan and Provider Enumeration System), the federal database of every provider issued a National Provider Identifier. We include providers with an active NPI and exclude any record carrying a deactivation date.
Specialty is the provider’s primary taxonomy as they registered it with NPPES. A provider practicing in more than one area appears under their primary taxonomy only.
Telehealth availability and clinician group affiliation come from the CMS Doctors and Clinicians national downloadable files. Telehealth is reported for roughly half of providers, so we publish it as a count of those who report it, never as a percentage of all providers.
Drug and device payments
Payment figures come from CMS Open Payments, the federal program created by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act. Drug and medical device companies are required by law to report payments they make to physicians, and physicians are given a period to review and dispute those records before publication.
Figures on this site cover calendar year 2025 and are matched to providers by National Provider Identifier. Every recipient shown is an individual clinician, not an organization.
Reported payments include consulting fees, speaking engagements, honoraria, travel and lodging, royalties, and food and beverage. The last category is the most common by count and the smallest by value. Across all providers in this directory the median total is under two hundred dollars, which typically represents a handful of catered meals at a practice.
A disclosed payment is a financial relationship, not evidence of wrongdoing. Many payments reflect legitimate research, education, or a surgeon receiving royalties on a device they helped design. We publish the figure and let you draw your own conclusion, the same way the federal government publishes it.
Roughly one in three providers in this directory has a 2025 payment record. A provider shown as having no recorded payments either received none or received an amount below the federal reporting threshold.
How percentages are calculated
Where a page shows a share, such as “38% received drug or device payments,” that is the number of providers in that group with at least one 2025 payment record, divided by the total providers in that group. It is a count of relationships, not a measure of dollars.
We suppress the percentage entirely for any group with fewer than 25 providers. In a group that small the figure describes a handful of individuals rather than a market, and it swings wildly year to year. The page shows the provider count instead.
Cities
City pages are built from the practice address each provider registered with NPPES. Because that field is entered by hand, the same city often appears under several spellings. We merge spelling and punctuation variants so that one city resolves to one page, and display the most commonly used form of the name.
A provider appears on the city page matching their registered practice address. Providers with multiple locations appear under their primary registered address only.
Where providers practice: groups, hospitals and practice size
State specialty pages include a section showing where those providers practice. It is built from three federal files published by CMS:
- Doctors and Clinicians National File (refreshed monthly): the group practice each clinician bills Medicare through, and how many clinicians belong to that group nationally.
- Facility Affiliation file (refreshed monthly): the hospitals where each clinician holds privileges.
- Hospital General Information (refreshed monthly): each hospital’s ownership type as reported to CMS (nonprofit, for-profit, government, physician-owned, VA, military or tribal) and its CMS overall star rating from 1 to 5.
These files only cover clinicians enrolled in Medicare. Each page states how many of its listed providers that covers. We show the practice size breakdown only when at least 10 providers and at least 40% of the page’s providers are enrolled in Medicare; below that the percentages would describe too small or too unrepresentative a slice.
Practice size uses the total number of clinicians in the group: solo or small practice (under 10), mid-size group (10 to 99), and large group or health system (100 or more). A clinician who bills through several groups is counted once, in the largest one. Only hospitals in the same state are listed, and a group or hospital must include at least two of the page’s providers to appear.
Group and hospital names are shown as registered with Medicare, which is sometimes a legal entity name rather than the name on the door. Ownership type is what the hospital reports to CMS. It does not identify private equity or other investor ownership, and we do not infer it.
What we do not do
- We do not rank, score, or rate providers. Listings are ordered by city and then alphabetically.
- We do not verify credentials, licensure, board certification, or malpractice history. Check your state medical board for that.
- We do not accept payment for placement, and no provider can buy a higher position.
- We previously displayed CMS MIPS scores and removed them in September 2026. MIPS is a Medicare payment adjustment measure, not a quality rating, and half of all scored clinicians fall within a narrow band near the top. It did not help anyone choose a doctor.
Updates and corrections
Provider records refresh monthly from the federal source files. Payment data refreshes annually when CMS publishes the new program year.
If a record about you is wrong, the correction has to happen at the source, because we republish federal data rather than maintain our own. NPPES records are updated through the NPPES system. Open Payments records are disputed through the CMS Open Payments portal. Once corrected at the source, the change appears here at the next refresh.
Not medical advice
This directory is informational. It is not medical advice, not a referral, and not an endorsement of any provider. Choosing a physician should involve your own research, your insurance network, and where appropriate your primary care provider.
