Medicare MCP Server (OpenPharma)

Community MCP server that exposes public CMS Medicare datasets — physician and prescriber utilization, hospital quality and safety measures, and Part B/Part D drug pricing — as a single keyless Claude tool.

   
Type MCP server
Supplier OpenPharma
Availability Beta — package.json declares v0.3.0 and no npm package is published (both medicare-mcp and @openpharma-org/medicare-mcp-server return 404 on the registry as of 2026-08-16), so installation is from source
Pricing Free / OSS (MIT, LICENSE in repo root, confirmed via the GitHub license API 2026-08-16). No API key required — CMS public APIs are keyless
Capabilities Read-only — queries public CMS APIs (provider data, Socrata ASP pricing)
Verified works · 2026-08-17
Security cleared · 2026-08-17 — MIT, provenance matches OpenPharma org, launch command confirmed against package.json/README

How to install

There is no published package, so build from source. package.json declares Node.js ≥ 16 (use ≥ 18 in practice, as the MCP SDK targets it).

git clone https://github.com/openpharma-org/medicare-mcp
cd medicare-mcp
npm install
npm run build

That produces build/index.js (the bin entry point declared in package.json).

  • Claude Code — register the built server over stdio:

    claude mcp add --transport stdio medicare-mcp -- node /path/to/medicare-mcp/build/index.js

    (replace /path/to/medicare-mcp with the absolute path of your clone — e.g. /Users/you/repos/medicare-mcp, or run pwd while still inside the directory from the previous step and paste that. The upstream README writes this path as /path/to/medicare-mcp-server/…, which does not match the repository’s own directory name — use medicare-mcp unless you renamed the clone.)

  • Claude Desktop — add to claude_desktop_config.json:

    {
  "mcpServers": {
    "medicare-mcp": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/path/to/medicare-mcp/build/index.js"],
      "env": {}
    }
  }
}

    (same absolute-path substitution; restart Claude Desktop after editing.)

  • Verify it starts (optional): node build/index.js from the clone should boot and wait on stdio. Ctrl-C once it does — Claude Code and Claude Desktop launch the process themselves, so this is not a service to leave running.

What it does

Exposes a single tool, medicare_info, dispatched by a method parameter. Upstream documents 17 methods in four groups:

  • Provider and prescriber utilization — search_providers (physician and practitioner data, 2013–2023), search_prescribers (Part D prescribing patterns by drug or specialty), search_hospitals (inpatient utilization and payments).
  • Hospital quality and safety — get_hospital_star_rating, get_readmission_rates (30-day, by condition), get_hospital_infections (CLABSI, CAUTI, SSI, C. difficile, MRSA), get_mortality_rates, search_hospitals_by_quality, compare_hospitals, get_vbp_scores (Value-Based Purchasing), get_hcahps_scores (patient experience).
  • Drug pricing — get_asp_pricing (Part B average sales price), get_asp_trend (quarterly trends), compare_asp_pricing, search_spending (Part B/D spending trends).
  • Coverage — search_formulary (Part D plan coverage with tier, prior-authorization and quantity limits), get_formulary_trend.

Primary use cases: real-world prescribing and utilization patterns, hospital quality benchmarking, Part B drug price trends, Part D formulary and access research.

Notes

The repo is titled “Unofficial Medicare MCP Server” — it is a community wrapper, not a CMS product. Data is refreshed by CMS quarterly, so figures lag the current quarter; confirm any number you plan to publish against the source dataset.

Complements CMS Data.gov MCP, which browses the CMS dataset catalog, and CMS Coverage, which answers national/local coverage-determination questions. This server differs by shipping pre-shaped Medicare quality and pricing queries rather than generic dataset access. For FDA-side regulatory data from the same publisher, see FDA MCP Server (OpenPharma).

The single-tool-with-methods design means the model has to pick the right method string; if a query returns nothing useful, name the method explicitly in the prompt.

Provider-level Medicare data identifies named clinicians and organizations. It is public, but treat downstream analyses with the care you would apply to any named-provider dataset.

Sources

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