Every number on the 3,738 hospital pages and 52 state pages comes from public federal files, through one committed program, the same way for every hospital. This page says what that program counts, and what it cannot see.
Payments: the CMS Open Payments general-payments file for program year 2025, which companies filed and CMS published the following June. Research payments and ownership interests are separate CMS files and are not included. Rosters: CMS Facility Affiliation Data, which links each Medicare-enrolled clinician to the hospitals they work with. Who is a physician: the payment record's own recipient type, or for someone with no payment, their primary specialty in the CMS Doctors and Clinicians file. Hospital names, cities and states: CMS Hospital General Information.
Physicians only, in the Open Payments sense: doctors of medicine and osteopathy, dentists, podiatrists, optometrists and chiropractors. Nurse practitioners, physician assistants and other clinicians are covered by Open Payments too, but these pages do not count them, so the word "physicians" means what it says. Only payment records filed as made to a physician are summed.
A physician affiliated with several hospitals appears on each of those hospitals' pages, because each hospital's committee would review them. The state and national totals count each physician once: nationally, 334,234 physicians affiliated with a listed hospital had reported general payments in 2025, totalling $1,649,060,274. A physician affiliated in two states counts in both state totals, so the state totals add up to more than the national one.
Short-term acute-care and critical-access hospitals with at least 11 affiliated clinicians who were paid more than $500 in the year. Every page describes at least 11 physicians with payments, so a page's headline figures are never one person's. Children's, psychiatric, rehabilitation and long-term hospitals are not yet included, and a hospital CMS lists without a name cannot have a page.
"Consulting" on a hospital page is five CMS payment categories added together: consulting fees, two categories of speaking and faculty compensation, education, and payments for a service with no set fee. "Travel and lodging" is the CMS category of that name. Everything else, such as food and beverage, is in the total but not broken out.
Affiliations are self-reported to Medicare and can lag a move, a new hire or a departure by months, so a roster is a starting point for a conflicts review, not a final list. A payment appears only if a company reported it, and companies can correct their filings after publication; the pages reflect the file as published. None of this is an accusation: most of what Open Payments shows is routine and reported exactly the way federal law requires.
The dataset was produced on 2026-10-18 by a single committed program (scripts/generate-hospital-pages.mts, run as npx tsx scripts/generate-hospital-pages.mts) from local copies of the files above. Each input file is fingerprinted in the dataset, and the program refuses to publish if it cannot first reproduce three counts PayClear has published before, from the same bytes. The run is deterministic: the same files give the same pages.
Questions about a figure, or a hospital you think is wrong? hello@payclear.health