Source: CMS Care Compare — Hospital General Information, dataset xubh-q36u (data.cms.gov)
Pediatric Map
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Methodology

This page documents exactly how Pediatric Map builds its directory. We believe that any site offering health-related information owes its readers full transparency about where the data comes from, how it is filtered, and what its limits are.

Data source

Every facility listed on Pediatric Map is sourced from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) "Hospital General Information" public dataset, dataset identifier xubh-q36u, available through the CMS Provider Data portal at data.cms.gov. This dataset lists every Medicare-certified hospital in the United States and its territories, along with the facility's address, telephone number, hospital type, ownership category, emergency-services status, birthing-friendly designation, and overall CMS quality rating. We pull a fresh CSV snapshot each quarter.

Inclusion criteria

A hospital is listed on Pediatric Map if it meets any of the following criteria:

  1. Dedicated Pediatric Hospital — CMS classifies the facility as a "Childrens" hospital, or the facility name contains the word "Children's" or "Pediatric." These are our flagship listings.
  2. Family & Pediatric Care Center — Acute care hospital with the federal birthing-friendly designation AND a CMS overall rating of 4 or 5 stars. These facilities maintain strong maternal-fetal and pediatric service lines.
  3. Birthing-Friendly Hospital — Acute care hospital with the federal birthing-friendly designation AND a CMS overall rating of 3 stars. Useful for families seeking maternity and newborn care close to home.

We deliberately exclude long-term care, psychiatric (except dedicated children's facilities, which qualify under the first criterion), and Veterans Administration / Department of Defense facilities from this directory because they do not, in general, deliver routine pediatric care to the broader public.

Specialty tagging

CMS does not publish a clean specialty taxonomy at the facility level, so Pediatric Map assigns specialty tags using a deterministic rule set:

  • Every facility is tagged General Pediatrics.
  • Birthing-friendly facilities are tagged Maternal-Fetal Medicine and Neonatal Intensive Care.
  • Facilities with on-site emergency services are tagged Pediatric Emergency Medicine.
  • Dedicated pediatric hospitals receive the full set of pediatric subspecialty tags by default.
  • Facility names containing keywords such as "heart," "cancer," "neuro," "ortho," or "spine" receive the corresponding subspecialty tag.

This approach is conservative — we err on the side of including a facility under a specialty when public data supports it. It will produce false positives in some cases (a hospital named "Heart of the City Children's" doesn't actually run a cardiac surgery program). For specific subspecialty availability, always confirm with the facility directly.

CMS quality ratings

The "stars" you see next to each facility come directly from the CMS Overall Hospital Rating, which aggregates dozens of underlying quality measures into a 1-to-5 scale. The methodology is publicly documented by CMS. We display the rating but do not interpret it for you. A high rating is a useful first signal of operational quality across the broad set of inpatient measures CMS surveys; it is not a guarantee that the facility is best for any specific condition. Many smaller children's hospitals do not receive a public rating because they don't have enough volume in the relevant measures — the absence of a rating is not a quality signal in either direction.

HRSA Health Center Sites (added September 2026)

The Health Centers directory is a second, self-contained dataset layered onto Pediatric Map. It lists 19,169 HRSA-funded Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) and FQHC Look-Alike community clinic sites, taken directly from HRSA's public Health Center Service Delivery and Look-Alike Sites file (data as of 09/10/2026, a Data Warehouse Record Create Date recorded on every row). This is a distinct outpatient facility type from the CMS hospital dataset described above; the two datasets are not cross-linked or joined — a health center listing never links to a hospital listing by name or vice versa.

License: HRSA (part of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services) is a federal executive agency; this dataset is a U.S. government work and is in the public domain, the AUTO-BUILD licence tier under this network's LICENSE-POLICY (v1). PII handling: under this network's PII-POLICY v2 amendment (2026-09-11, owner decisions E8+E10), institutional/facility datasets published by a government agency may render the facility's street address and public phone number as recorded; every record in this HRSA file is a facility/site-level record (not a named individual), so that amendment applies cleanly here.

Selection rule: every one of the 19,236 rows in the source file is included unless it cannot be placed in the state → city structure this section uses: 66 rows carry HRSA's own "XX" placeholder state code (undetermined/mobile-service locations with no fixed state) and 1 row has a blank city field; those 67 rows are excluded entirely and are not rendered anywhere on the site. The remaining 19,169 rows are rendered exactly as recorded, with no dedup, merge, or invented values.

Fields rendered: site name, street address (omitted on the 1 row where HRSA's own field is blank), city, state/territory, ZIP (omitted where blank, 8 rows), phone (omitted where blank, 13 rows), website (omitted where blank, 8,496 rows — most sites in this file simply have none on record), county, HRSA health-center type (FQHC or FQHC Look-Alike), and HRSA's site status (every row in this extract is "Active"). Fields deliberately withheld: the FQHC Site NPI Number and FQHC Site Medicare Billing Number (present in the source but not required by this section's scope, withheld by default per PII-POLICY's "arguable inclusion" guidance pending an explicit operator call), the parent grantee organization's own address (a separate field from the site's own address), congressional district and representative names, and geocoded coordinates (no enrichment or re-geocoding was performed).

Refresh cadence: this section reflects a single extract dated 09/10/2026. Unlike the quarterly CMS hospital refresh described above, Pediatric Map does not yet have an automated refresh pipeline for the HRSA file, so no recurring cadence is claimed for it.

Corrections: if a health center listing is wrong or outdated, use the contact page and reference the HRSA source file and the specific site name.

Refresh cadence and corrections

We rebuild the directory each calendar quarter, immediately after CMS publishes a new dataset version. If you spot a facility that has closed, moved, or merged, please email us — we will correct individual records in between full rebuilds.