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Know the care you’ll have, before you move in
A 0 to 100 Healthcare Access Score for every U.S. ZIP Code. See how easy it is to actually get care where you live.
Covered by
Most find out after a heart attack, a cancer diagnosis, or a 90-minute drive to the nearest ER. We put that risk on a map: one score, every ZIP, before you sign the lease.
Source: HRSA Bureau of Health Workforce, 2024
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 them at drive-time distance. Not just a phone-book dump.
Search providers →Hospitals, urgent care, dialysis, behavioral health. CMS star ratings, mortality, readmission, and HCAHPS patient-experience, prebuilt for every U.S. ZIP.
Browse hospital rankings →How the score is built
Every ZIP gets four public driver scores. They combine into the 0 to 100 Healthcare Access Score you see on the map. No single factor can carry a ZIP. No single factor can sink it on its own.
Provider Score
Distance-weighted access to every NPI-registered provider (primary care, specialists, mental health, preventive, dental), net of population competition.
Hospital Score
Proximity to hospital inpatient capacity and emergency/trauma care, weighted by bed count, CMS star rating, and patient-experience scores.
Travel Score
How much friction a resident hits getting to care: drive times, transit coverage, 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 the weighted combination of Provider, Hospital, and Travel, multiplied by a People-score modifier. A ZIP with great hospitals but no transportation gets penalized. A ZIP with dense providers but high SDOH vulnerability gets penalized. The math tells the whole story. 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 are unavailable, understaffed, or unreachable. The main score is explained by People Score, Provider Score, Hospital Score, and Travel Score.
Every ZIP 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 drive times 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 proximity and quality of inpatient and emergency facilities. 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. Every ZIP-level Healthcare Access Score, every provider profile, every facility profile, and the full interactive map are free to use. A free developer API tier (1,000 calls/month) 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-score-driver structure with condition-relevant specialties weighted accordingly.
The composite score is validated against CDC PLACES health outcomes (target correlation r > 0.65), County Health Rankings (r > 0.70), and HRSA HPSA shortage-area designations (concordance > 70%). The weight calibration uses constrained Elastic Net regression with 5-fold cross-validation on real utilization data, not expert opinion.
All 21 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 score is reproducible from the public source registry.
Provider files update weekly (NPPES delta) and monthly (NPPES full file). Facility ratings refresh monthly from CMS Hospital Compare and Care Compare. Census demographics update annually. A full pipeline run recomputes every ZIP score on the first of each month.
