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Know the care you’ll have, before you move in
A 0 to 100 Healthcare Access Score for eligible ZIP/ZCTA records. See how easy it is to actually get care where you live.
Covered by
Shortage designations are public, but they are rarely visible during everyday housing, relocation, or planning decisions. CartoChrome puts access context on a map: one score for each eligible ZIP/ZCTA record, before you sign the lease.
Source: HRSA Bureau of Health Workforce shortage area registry
Same country. Different ZIP Codes.
Known metros
What’s in the box
One main Healthcare Access Score plus ten condition-specific scores for Alzheimer's, asthma, diabetes, hypertension, and four cancers. The public model is always the main score plus People Score, Provider Score, Hospital Score, and Travel Score.
Explore by condition →Every NPI-registered healthcare provider (nurse practitioners, dentists, therapists, behavioral-health specialists, and every other clinical category), geocoded, specialty-tagged, and weighted by how many people realistically compete for nearby care. Not just a phone-book dump.
Search providers →Hospitals, urgent care, dialysis, behavioral health. Public CMS facility signals are used where available and are shown as context, not recommendations.
Browse hospital rankings →How the score is built
Each publishable ZIP/ZCTA record gets four public driver scores. They combine into the 0 to 100 Healthcare Access Score you see on the map. A very weak driver can block or lower publication, and every published score must reconcile to all four drivers.
Provider Score
Distance-weighted access to every NPI-registered provider (primary care, specialists, mental health, preventive, dental), net of population competition.
Hospital Score
Access to hospital inpatient capacity and emergency/trauma care, using bed count and public facility context where available.
Travel Score
How much friction a resident hits getting to care: distance, transit context, and the share of households without a vehicle.
People Score
Social-determinants-of-health adjustment across insurance, economic hardship, health literacy, disability, and age vulnerability.
The overall score is a weighted four-driver contract: Provider, Hospital, Travel, and People. A ZIP with great hospitals but weak travel access gets penalized. A ZIP with dense providers but high social barriers gets penalized. The math is an access model based on available public data; local context still matters. Read the full methodology →
Best states for healthcare access
Who uses it
Frequently asked
A Healthcare Access Score is a 0 to 100 rating of how easy it is to actually use healthcare in a given U.S. ZIP Code. 100 means exceptional access. 0 indicates a healthcare desert where critical services may be unavailable, understaffed, or hard to reach based on available public data. The main score is explained by People Score, Provider Score, Hospital Score, and Travel Score.
Each publishable ZIP/ZCTA record gets four score drivers. People Score adjusts for social determinants of health such as insurance, economic hardship, health literacy, disability, and age vulnerability. Provider Score measures distance-weighted access to NPI-registered providers. Hospital Score measures proximity to hospital inpatient capacity, emergency and trauma care. Travel Score captures distance, transportation access, and the share of households without a vehicle.
Provider Score (0 to 100) is distance-weighted spatial access to every NPI-registered healthcare provider across every clinical category (nurse practitioners, dentists, therapists, behavioral-health specialists, and more). Hospital Score (0 to 100) is access to inpatient and emergency facilities, with public facility signals used where available. Travel Score (0 to 100) is how reachable those providers actually are given local transportation. People Score (0 to 100) is the social-determinants adjustment applied to the final composite. A high overall score requires all four to be reasonable; one weak component drags the whole score down.
Yes. Published ZIP-level Healthcare Access Scores, provider profiles, facility profiles, and the full interactive map are free to use. A free developer API tier with the current published monthly limit and a free embeddable widget are available for real-estate, senior-living, relocation, and health-system websites.
CartoChrome scores each ZIP against 11 health dimensions: one overall Healthcare Access Score plus ten condition-specific scores for Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, asthma, breast cancer, COPD, hypertension, lung cancer, prostate cancer, type 1 diabetes, and type 2 diabetes. Each condition uses the same four public drivers, with condition-relevant provider and facility inputs.
The composite score is benchmarked against CDC PLACES health outcomes, County Health Rankings, and HRSA HPSA shortage-area designations. Public methodology targets include correlation and concordance checks, and local context still matters when interpreting any ZIP score.
All score sources are public: CMS NPPES and Care Compare for providers, CMS POS and Hospital Compare for facilities, the U.S. Census American Community Survey for demographics, HRSA for shortage-area designations, CDC PLACES for health outcomes, USDA RUCA for rurality, and several others. No proprietary or licensed datasets. Every publishable score is reproducible from the public source registry.
Update cadence is source-specific and published in the source registry. Provider files, facility datasets, Census demographics, shortage-area data, and score runs each carry freshness status so stale inputs can block publication.
