Sources & methodology

Medicare Nav publishes facts with citations. Every displayed fact carries its dataset, file version, and ingest date. A fact without a source does not render.

What you're looking at now

The directory covers all 9.3 million active providers nationwide, drawn from the CMS NPPES Registry (July 2026 monthly full, ingested 2026-08-06). Provider identity, specialty (NUCC taxonomy), city, state, and ZIP are real federal data. Search proximity uses US Census ZIP-code centroids.

Federal payment, utilization, and exclusion datasets (CMS Open Payments; Physician & Other Practitioners; OIG LEIE; SAM.gov) are labeled ingest pending where we haven't yet loaded them for this cohort. We would rather show a labeled gap than an unsourced number.

Plan-neutral and buyer-neutral

No insurer, plan, or commercial relationship influences which providers appear, how they rank, or how they're presented. Ranking uses only specialty match, name match, distance from your ZIP, and federal Medicare enrollment standing. Our tests assert that ranking output is byte-identical when all commercial data is stripped — so we can prove we don't steer.

Facilities get stars. Individuals get facts.

We show official CMS star ratings for hospitals, nursing homes, home health, and dialysis facilities. We never compute or display a rating, score, or grade for a named individual clinician. Attestations use a fixed vocabulary — address correct, phone works, accepting new patients — never free text.

How Medicare Nav is funded

Using the directory is free and never requires anything in return. If you ask for plan help, we connect you with a licensed insurance agent and share only the information you explicitly consent to share, with the named partners shown to you at that moment. We are a third-party marketing organization. The directory itself is plan-neutral and buyer-neutral — funding never influences what you see.

For accountable care organizations and provider groups, we offer de-identified market analytics and directory-accuracy insight — never patient leads. Patient contact information is shared only through the consented plan-help path above, and only with licensed insurance carriers.

Independent — we don't represent any carrier

Medicare Nav is an independent service. It is not an insurance agency and does not represent, act as an agent for, or sell the plans of any insurance carrier. Carrier and plan names are the trademarks of their respective owners and are shown for identification and comparison only. Displaying a carrier's name does not imply that carrier's affiliation, endorsement, or sponsorship. When you ask for plan help, we describe which carriers operate in your area based on public CMS data — we do not steer you toward any of them.

Not affiliated with Medicare

Medicare Nav is an XSpan.ai service. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Medicare, CMS, or any government agency. It is not a review site. All data sources are public federal datasets.