The United States has 7,090,243 registered healthcare providers across 690 medical specialties, 5,432 Medicare-certified hospitals, and 14,710 certified nursing homes, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). This page collects the national reference figures behind PlainDoctor, with the methodology for every derived number. Every figure is drawn from the federal National Provider Identifier Registry (CMS NPPES) - more than 7 million providers, maintained since May 2007, with 2023 Medicare Part D data, and, according to CMS, can be searched, compared, and traced in our methodology.

California has the most registered healthcare providers of any state, with 937,423 active NPI records. The ten largest states together account for 3,841,633 providers - 54% of the national total.

The NPPES registry counts every individual who bills healthcare services, physicians, nurses, therapists, technicians, and trainees alike, classified under the NUCC Health Care Provider Taxonomy. Its largest single category is Behavior Technician, with 545,400 registered providers nationwide, a reminder that most NPI records belong to non-physician provider types.

According to the most recent annual CMS Medicare Part D Prescriber Public Use File, 1,370,886 providers prescribed under Medicare Part D, writing 1,605,789,128 claims with a total drug cost of $274.2 billion. The average Medicare beneficiary served was 70.7 years old. 448,035 prescribers had at least one opioid claim; across prescribers with opioid activity recorded, opioid prescriptions averaged 6.4% of claims. Part D files are released by CMS with roughly a two-year lag and cover the Medicare population only, see the Part D data guide for how to read these figures.

477,587 clinicians have a score in the CMS Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) performance data, with a national average final score of 83.1 out of 100. How the percentile shown on each provider profile is computed is documented in the methodology.

CMS Care Compare lists 5,432 Medicare-certified hospitals across 56 states and territories. 3,182 carry an overall star rating, and 384 hold the top five-star rating. Browse the hospital directory for individual ratings.

The CMS Five-Star Quality Rating System covers 14,710 certified nursing homes across 53 states and territories, with an average capacity of 107 beds per facility. Inspection, staffing, and quality-measure ratings for each facility are in the nursing-home directory.

According to the CMS Open Payments program (the Sunshine Act's public disclosure of financial relationships between drug and device manufacturers and physicians), 979,136 physicians (13.8% of all registered providers) received a reportable industry payment in 2024, totaling $2.64 billion across 15,336,988 individual payment records. Orthopaedic and reconstructive surgery specialties top the list by total dollars, while several device-heavy surgical specialties post the highest average payment per physician, both of which the table below breaks out.

Every number on this page is read directly from the underlying federal dataset at the data vintage shown above, nothing is estimated or hand-entered. Figures change when CMS publishes new files and our pipeline ingests them, so a citation should include the as-of date. PlainDoctor does not rate, rank, or recommend providers, and these statistics describe registration and Medicare activity, not quality of care.