Methodology

This page documents exactly how ClinicMapper 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 ClinicMapper 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 ClinicMapper 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, 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 ClinicMapper 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.

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.