Looking for a Definitive Healthcare Alternative?
Fonteum publishes healthcare provider data built entirely on 17+ federal source families public-record sources — 6.8M+ active providers from CMS NPPES, 68,055+ OIG exclusions, and CMS Care Compare facility quality records — with source name, last-checked date, and limitation on every field. No proprietary data model. No black-box aggregation. Every cited fact traces back to CMS, OIG HHS, HRSA, or another named federal dataset.
Fonteum vs Definitive Healthcare
| Definitive Healthcare | Fonteum | |
|---|---|---|
| Data sources | IQVIA claims feeds, health system EMR aggregation, proprietary data model | 17+ federal source families: CMS NPPES, PECOS, Care Compare, OIG LEIE, HRSA, BLS, Census — all primary-source, explicitly cited |
| Provenance transparency | Methodology proprietary; source lineage not field-level disclosed | Source name + last-checked date + limitation on every rendered field via provider_field_provenance |
| Pricing model | $30,000–$185,000+/yr enterprise software license | Free public access to all research + datasets; pilot tier from $2,500/mo for custom exports and API access |
| Federal source citation | Federal data consumed internally; not surfaced in exports | Explicit CMS dataset IDs + federal data catalog links on every record. Cite as: CMS NPPES · last checked [date] |
| FHIR R4 API | Proprietary REST API; not FHIR-conformant | FHIR R4 US Core 6.1.0 — 5 USCDI v3 resources: Practitioner, Organization, Location, PractitionerRole, HealthcareService |
| SOC 2 status | SOC 2 Type II claimed | SOC 2 Type 1 in progress, Sept 2026 target. Current posture documented at /trust |
Federal primary sources, not proprietary aggregation
Every field traces to a named federal record
When Fonteum displays a provider's NPI, taxonomy code, or PECOS enrollment status, the underlying record is CMS NPPES (6.8M+ active providers, parsed from the weekly full-replacement file) or CMS PECOS — not a proprietary aggregation layer. The source name, the date the pipeline last reconciled the field, and any known limitations are surfaced on every display via the provider_field_provenance layer. A compliance audit can trace any displayed fact back to the originating federal dataset — by CMS dataset ID, OIG HHS file path, or HRSA portal URL.
17+ federal source families, not one proprietary model
Fonteum ingests CMS NPPES (6.8M+ providers), CMS PECOS, CMS Care Compare (8 facility modules), OIG LEIE (68,055+ exclusions), CMS PBJ Nurse Staffing (1.3M+ daily records, 14,537 facilities), CMS SNF All Owners (280,207 ownership rows), CMS NH Deficiency Citations (418,148 records), HRSA HPSA, HRSA UDS, CMS QPP MIPS, CMS HCRIS Hospital Cost Reports, BLS OEWS, Census, and more. Each source family has an explicit Tier rating, refresh cadence, and redistribution posture documented at /sources. No dependency on a single commercial data vendor or claims feed.
Open-core model: public access + pilot tier
All research snapshots, study CSVs, and JSON datasets are freely accessible at /research — no account required. For teams that need custom exports, API access, or methodology versioning commitments, the pilot tier starts at $2,500/mo with a 30-day no-penalty exit. The data product inherits the same source-provenance contract as the public surfaces.
Ingest → provenance → deliver
STEP 1 / INGEST
Pull directly from federal data portals
Fonteum ingests 17+ federal source families straight from their government portals — CMS (NPPES, PECOS, Care Compare, PBJ, SNF All Owners), OIG HHS, HRSA, BLS, and Census — on each source's native cadence. NPPES refreshes weekly, OIG LEIE monthly, Care Compare and PBJ quarterly. No intermediary aggregator, no proprietary claims feed: the same federal files regulators publish are the files Fonteum parses.
STEP 2 / PROVENANCE
Attach source, date, and limitation to every field
Each parsed fact is written to the provider_field_provenance layer with the source name, the date the pipeline last reconciled it, and any known limitation. A provider's PECOS enrollment status, an OIG LEIE exclusion flag, or a nursing home's staffing rating each carries its own citation. Suppressed or missing source values are flagged as data-availability states — not imputed — so the audit trail reflects the federal record as it actually is.
STEP 3 / DELIVER
Free research, FHIR R4 API, and scoped exports
The structured, provenance-tagged data ships three ways: free public research datasets at /research (CSV + JSON, no account), a FHIR R4 US Core 6.1.0 API with SMART Backend Services auth and HL7 bulk $export, and scoped pilot exports from $2,500/mo for custom geography, specialty, or facility-type cuts. The same source-provenance contract holds across all three surfaces.
Common questions
- What makes Fonteum different from Definitive Healthcare?
- Definitive Healthcare is an enterprise market-intelligence platform built on IQVIA claims feeds and a proprietary aggregation model. Fonteum is built entirely on federal primary-source public records — 17+ federal source families including CMS NPPES (6.8M+ active providers), CMS PECOS Medicare enrollment, CMS Care Compare, OIG LEIE (68,055+ excluded providers), HRSA, BLS, and Census. The structural difference is provenance: every Fonteum field surfaces the source name, the date the pipeline last reconciled it, and any known limitation, written to the provider_field_provenance layer. A compliance auditor can trace any displayed fact back to the originating federal dataset — the CMS dataset ID, the OIG HHS file, or the HRSA portal — rather than to an opaque aggregation step. Definitive's lineage is internal to its model and is not surfaced field-by-field in exports, which is the gap that matters for credentialing, audit, and regulatory use cases.
- Does Fonteum replace Definitive Healthcare for hospital market analysis?
- They serve different buyers, and for pure sales-territory market intelligence Definitive Healthcare remains the broader product. Definitive targets commercial and sales-intelligence teams needing facility counts, technology-install signals, and contact data assembled from claims and proprietary sourcing. Fonteum targets compliance, credentialing, M&A diligence, and research teams that need field-level provenance against federal primary sources — OIG LEIE exclusion flags, PECOS enrollment status, CMS Care Compare deficiency histories (418,148 citation records across 14,635 facilities), PBJ staffing (1.3M+ daily records across 14,537 facilities), and SNF ownership (280,207 rows across 14,425 facilities). If your work product requires knowing exactly which federal record backs a specific field — and being able to cite it in an audit trail — Fonteum is the right layer. Many teams use both: Definitive for go-to-market, Fonteum for the provenance-grade compliance record.
- Is Fonteum's provider data free to use?
- All published research snapshots and datasets at /research are free to access and cite with attribution, with no account and no API key required for the static files. This is possible because the underlying records are federal public works (17 U.S.C. § 105) — NPPES, PECOS, Care Compare, OIG LEIE, HRSA, BLS, and Census data are not copyrightable, so Fonteum redistributes the structured, provenance-tagged versions openly. The paid pilot tier ($2,500–$5,000/mo) adds custom export scoping, FHIR R4 API access for production workloads, methodology-versioning commitments, and a 30-day no-penalty exit. By contrast, Definitive Healthcare and comparable enterprise platforms typically require a five- or six-figure annual license before any data is accessible. There is no paywalled tier for basic public-record access on Fonteum — the paywall, where it exists, is only for custom scoping and production API throughput.
- Does Fonteum have a FHIR R4 API for EHR vendor integrations?
- Yes. Fonteum implements HL7 FHIR R4 US Core 6.1.0 with 5 USCDI v3 Provider resources: Practitioner, Organization, Location, PractitionerRole, and HealthcareService. The CapabilityStatement — the conformance resource that Epic, Cerner, and athenahealth integrations probe first — is at /api/fhir/metadata, returns application/fhir+json, and is available without authentication for capability discovery. SMART Backend Services auth (JWT assertions signed with RS384, exchanged for a short-lived token) is supported for system-to-system integrations, which is the pattern federal and EHR-vendor pipelines require. Every resource carries a 14-tuple provenance block on meta.tag, so the federal source citation travels with the record into any downstream system. For large pulls, the HL7 FHIR R4 Bulk Data Access ($export) endpoint serializes records as NDJSON. This is a materially different posture from Definitive Healthcare's proprietary REST API, which is not FHIR-conformant.
- How many providers and federal source families does Fonteum cover?
- Fonteum ingests 17+ federal source families. The identity backbone is CMS NPPES, which covers 6.8M+ active providers across 120+ NUCC taxonomy codes, parsed from the weekly full-replacement file of roughly 8 million records. On top of that sit CMS PECOS Medicare enrollment, CMS Care Compare (eight facility modules including nursing home, home health, hospice, dialysis, and ASC), CMS PBJ Daily Nurse Staffing (1.3M+ daily records across 14,537 facilities, CY2025Q2), CMS SNF All Owners (280,207 ownership rows across 14,425 facilities), CMS NH Health Deficiency Citations (418,148 records across 14,635 facilities), OIG LEIE (68,055+ exclusions, refreshed monthly), HRSA HPSA and UDS, CMS QPP MIPS, CMS HCRIS hospital cost reports, BLS OEWS, and Census population data. Each family is documented at /sources with its tier rating, refresh cadence, jurisdiction coverage, and redistribution posture, so you can see exactly what backs every record before you rely on it.
- How does Fonteum handle data gaps and limitations?
- Fonteum surfaces gaps rather than papering over them, which is a deliberate departure from platforms that impute or smooth missing values. The clearest example is the CMS SNF All Owners dataset: 82.4% of the top-10 nursing home chains have missing ownership_percentage values in the source file — a gap first documented in a Health Affairs 2024 analysis and reproducible from Fonteum's ingestion of the public CMS file. Rather than substitute an estimated percentage, Fonteum flags the field with an explicit data-availability state so an M&A or compliance team knows the source itself is silent. Every rendered field carries not just a source name and last-checked date but a limitation note where one applies — suppression sentinels in CMS files (such as redacted small-cell counts) are preserved as nulls, not coerced to zero. This is the audit-grade posture: the federal record as it actually is, with its silences marked, not a derived score that hides them.
- /sources → Full source library — 17+ federal source families with tier, refresh cadence, and limitations.
- /data-provenance → Field-level provenance pipeline — how every fact ties to a federal record.
- /docs/fhir → FHIR R4 US Core 6.1.0 endpoint reference and CapabilityStatement.
- /data → Dataset catalog, B2B export concepts, and pilot pricing.
- /trust → Security, compliance, and SOC 2 posture.