Every Medicare-certified provider starts here.
The Provider of Services (POS) file is CMS's master registry of every Medicare- and Medicaid-certified provider in the country. It tracks what a facility fundamentally is — its legal identity, its certification status, its physical location, its ownership structure, and what it is equipped to provide.
Every other dataset on this platform — quality measures, cost reports, DRG claims, service area data — connects back to the POS file through a single key: the CMS Certification Number (CCN). The POS file is where that record begins, and it is the authoritative source for the demographic and structural information that makes peer comparison possible.
Four categories common to every provider type.
Regardless of whether the record belongs to a hospital, a dialysis facility, or a hospice, the same foundational information is captured for every provider in the file.
Hospitals carry additional structural depth.
All provider types share the core record. Hospitals are the exception — the POS file includes two additional layers of structural detail that do not exist for other provider types.
| Provider Type | Structural Fields | Additional Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Hospitals | Total beds, certified beds, operating rooms | Specialized bed counts (rehab, hospice, ventilator, NICU, psychiatric, and more), medical school affiliation, swing bed size, waivers — plus a full 57-field service inventory covered below |
| Nursing Homes | Total beds, certified beds | Bed count is the primary structural dimension; detailed financial and quality data come from other datasets |
| Dialysis Facilities | Total beds / stations | Station count reflects treatment capacity; clinical and staffing depth comes from the PDC quality dataset |
| Home Health | Core record only | No facility-level bed or capacity fields — home health agencies are defined by service area and visit volume rather than physical capacity |
| Hospice | Core record only | Structural profile is minimal; operational depth comes from cost reports and the PDC quality dataset |
| Long-Term Care Hospitals | Total beds, certified beds | Shares the hospital file but carries a distinct provider type code; does not include the hospital services inventory |
| Inpatient Rehab Facilities | Total beds, certified beds | Shares the hospital file; rehab-specific detail comes from the IRF quality dataset and cost reports |
For hospitals: what the facility is equipped to provide.
Hospitals carry a second layer in the POS file that no other provider type has — a service inventory of 57 binary fields indicating whether a facility offers a given capability. These describe what a hospital is equipped to provide, not how well it performs.
The inventory spans six clinical domains. The combination of services present — matched against bed count, ownership type, and geography — is what defines a hospital's clinical role in a market.
Three questions only the POS file answers.
Where the data comes from and how often it is updated.
The POS file is published quarterly by CMS. The hospital file and the non-hospital file are published separately. Each release is a full current snapshot — reflecting each facility's status as of that publication date.