Specialist Access

Higher county-level specialist clinician supply scores higher using CMS Doctors and Clinicians records mapped through Census ZCTA-county relationships.

Scale0-100

Higher values rank better for this score.

How It's Calculated

The latest published score is normalized to a 0-100 scale. The method below explains what the score rewards, with technical source metadata available for audit.

1
The scorer filters CMS Doctors and Clinicians rows to medical and surgical specialties while excluding primary-care, behavioral-health, therapy, dietitian, chiropractic, and similar non-specialist rows.
2
Rows are mapped from practice ZIP to dominant Census ZCTA county, then deduplicated by NPI within each county.
3
County specialist rates are smoothed toward the national specialist rate using a 50,000-person prior, then percentile-ranked across scored places.

Technical details

Score TypeMaster Score

Read from the current master score table for this criterion.

Ranking BasisSingle Score

The top 10 below ignore your blended relocation weights and sort only by Specialist Access.

No source details available for this score.

What This Score Means

Specialist Access rewards places in counties with stronger non-behavioral specialist clinician supply.

Statistics Feeding This Score

Specialist clinician rate
Unique specialist NPIs per county after CMS specialty filtering and ZIP-to-county assignment.
Source: CMS Doctors and Clinicians National Downloadable File
ZIP-to-county bridge
CMS practice ZIPs are mapped to a dominant county using Census ZCTA-county relationship areas.
Source: Census ZCTA-to-county relationship file
Smoothed county rate
Specialist counts are divided by county population and smoothed toward the national specialist rate.
Source: Derived from CMS and County Health Rankings

Source Data

Source: CMS Doctors and Clinicians National Downloadable FileClinician practice-location records with NPI, ZIP, and primary specialty, used for county-level specialist supply after filtering and ZIP-to-county mapping.Source: Census ZCTA-to-county relationship file2020 Census relationship file used to map clinician ZIP/ZCTA values to a dominant county for specialist availability.Source: County Health Rankings & RoadmapsCounty, state, and national public-health measures from the March 25, 2026 supplemental analytic release.

Known Limits

Hospital access still uses straight-line distance from a representative place point, not road travel time, ambulance routing, congestion, or parcel-level access.
CMS quality and ED timeliness are historical public reporting measures, not live wait times, real-time diversion status, or guarantees of care quality for a specific patient.
Provider and specialist supply are county-level signals and do not capture exact appointment availability, insurance networks, referral patterns, or neighborhood-level provider access.
Specialist availability uses CMS Doctors and Clinicians practice ZIPs mapped through Census ZCTA-county relationships, so ZIP-to-county assignment is approximate.
CMS warns that NPI issuance and clinician listing data are not a live validation of licensure, credentialing, insurance acceptance, or current capacity.

Top 10 Locations

Ranked by Specialist Access.

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