Medicare has released Physician Compare data

When I started working on DocSpot in 2009, I sent an e-mail to CMS asking for a database dump of their Physician Compare product. They politely declined. The person responding to my e-mail noted that their service was always available. Sigh, another data silo. Among other attributes, Medicare's data set gives some indication as to whether a provider accepts Medicare insurance, which can be an important factor in selecting a doctor.

Years later, they noted on their website that the data for Physician Compare was available on their website, grouping it with other data sets such as Hospital Compare (which actually were available). I would periodically check, but alas, the data for Physician Compare continued to not be available despite indications otherwise. I was excited to find out today that they actually do have the data available now. For those curious, the data set contains over 800,000 providers, but that number includes non-physicians (e.g. nurses). We'll be working on integrating that data set.