CMS's new open-data release gives ASCs a HOPD benchmark — but no ASC dataset
An April 6 Federal Register notice releases seven Original Medicare and Medicaid provider-and-service datasets, including hospital outpatient utilization and payment — and none of them is ASC-specific.
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CMS has released seven machine-readable Original Medicare and Medicaid datasets covering provider-and-service utilization and payment — and exactly zero of them are specific to ambulatory surgery centers. The release, announced in an April 6 Federal Register notice (91 FR 17281), is published under the OPEN Government Data Act and tied directly to the CY2026 hospital outpatient and ASC payment rule.
The notice names seven public data assets, each carrying “utilization and payment data aggregated by provider and service”: Original Medicare Physician & Other Practitioners; Inpatient Hospitals; Outpatient Hospitals; Part D Prescribers (by provider and drug); DMEPOS by referring provider; DMEPOS by supplier; and Medicaid Provider Spending. CMS frames the release as a tool to “support public engagement in identifying and preventing fraud, waste, and abuse” and to advance “provider price transparency,” and it cites the Calendar Year 2026 OPPS/ASC Final Rule (CMS-1834-FC) by name.
What the release does — and does not — contain
The phrase “Ambulatory Surgical Center” appears in the notice only inside the title of that CY2026 rule. There is no ASC provider-and-service dataset in the release. For ASC operators, that distinction is the whole story: this is not new utilization data about surgery centers.
What it is, instead, is a comparative benchmark. The Outpatient Hospitals — By Provider and Service file reports volume and Medicare payment by named hospital outpatient department and HCPCS code. Because most high-volume ASC procedures are also paid in the hospital outpatient setting, an operator can pull a local HOPD’s reported volume and payment for, say, a cataract or arthroscopy code and set it beside their own internal numbers. That is a site-of-care benchmarking exercise against hospital data — not a window into ASC volumes, which CMS still publishes no provider-level file for.
The dataset is hosted on the CMS data portal, where the provider-and-service files have historically refreshed on an annual cycle. The notice itself sets no separate effective date for availability.
The honest read
The standing data gap is unchanged. ASCs file no Medicare cost reports and CMS releases no ASC provider-and-service dataset, so the only nationwide ASC payment and volume figures remain MedPAC’s aggregate tabulations, not anything operators can query provider-by-provider. The April release improves the comparison set — every HOPD’s outpatient line is now queryable — without closing that gap. Treat it as a benchmarking input, not as ASC market data.