Looking for a Komodo Health Alternative?
Fonteum publishes healthcare provider data built on federal primary-source records — not claims aggregation. CMS NPPES (6.8M+ active providers), PECOS, Care Compare, OIG LEIE (68,055+ exclusions), HRSA, and 17 additional federal source families. Every field carries the source name, last-checked date, and limitation — citable back to the originating federal dataset, not a proprietary claims-derived model.
Fonteum vs Komodo Health
| Komodo Health | Fonteum | |
|---|---|---|
| Data sourcing model | Claims data aggregation: medical, pharmacy, and lab claims from payers and PBMs — opaque sourcing, not field-level disclosed | 17+ federal source families: CMS NPPES, PECOS, Care Compare, OIG LEIE, HRSA, BLS, Census — all primary-source, explicitly cited |
| Provenance transparency | Patient-encounter claims data; source lineage proprietary and not externally citable | Source name + last-checked date + limitation on every rendered field via provider_field_provenance. Compliance auditors can trace any fact to its federal record |
| Pricing model | Enterprise license; typical six-figure annual contracts for claims dataset access | Free public access to all research + datasets; pilot tier from $2,500/mo for custom exports and API access |
| Federal source citation | Federal and claims data consumed internally; not surfaced as external citations | Explicit CMS dataset IDs + federal data catalog links on every record. Cite as: CMS NPPES · last checked [date] |
| Post-acute facility coverage | Claims-based utilization patterns for post-acute settings | Direct CMS facility records: Care Compare NH/HH/Hospice, PBJ Daily Nurse Staffing, PECOS SNF All Owners — facility identity from the source, not inferred from claims |
| FHIR R4 API | Proprietary API; FHIR conformance not published | FHIR R4 US Core 6.1.0 — 5 USCDI v3 resources: Practitioner, Organization, Location, PractitionerRole, HealthcareService |
Federal records, not inferred signals
Claims data tells you what happened; federal records tell you who is enrolled
Claims data infers provider attributes from billing patterns — specialty from claim codes, affiliation from claim groupings. Federal primary-source records are the enrollment and licensing layer: CMS NPPES records the taxonomy code at enumeration for 6.8M+ active providers; PECOS records Medicare participation status; OIG LEIE records 68,055+ exclusions on a monthly refresh; Care Compare records facility certification. These are not inferences from billing — they are the source-of-truth records regulators and payers use for credentialing and compliance, each tagged with a last-checked date so you can see how current the record is.
Post-acute facility data from the source
Fonteum's post-acute coverage is sourced directly from CMS: Care Compare for nursing homes, home health, and hospice; CMS PBJ Daily Nurse Staffing for facility-level RN/LPN/CNA hours (1.3M+ daily records across 14,537 facilities, CY2025Q2); PECOS SNF All Owners for ownership disclosure (280,207 ownership rows across 14,425 facilities); and CMS NH Health Deficiency Citations (418,148 records across 14,635 facilities). Every record carries a CMS dataset citation, a snapshot date, and any known limitations. No intermediary layer between the federal record and the displayed fact.
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 scoped to specific geographies, specialties, or facility types, 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. There is no licensed claims feed and no intermediary aggregator between the federal file and the parse.
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 facility's PBJ staffing hours each carries its own federal citation. Missing source values — like the 82.4% SNF ownership-percentage gap — are flagged, not imputed.
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. Every surface inherits the same source-citation contract.
Common questions
- What is the key difference between Komodo Health and Fonteum?
- Komodo Health is built on claims data — medical, pharmacy, and lab claims aggregated from payers and PBMs into a longitudinal patient-encounter model. That gives strong utilization and patient-journey signals, but the source lineage is proprietary and cannot be externally cited: the underlying claims feeds are licensed and the derivation is internal. Fonteum is built on federal primary-source records — 17+ federal source families including CMS NPPES (6.8M+ active providers), CMS PECOS Medicare enrollment, CMS Care Compare, OIG LEIE (68,055+ exclusions), HRSA, BLS, and Census. Every field carries the federal source citation, the date the pipeline last reconciled it, and any known limitation, written to the provider_field_provenance layer. The practical consequence: a Fonteum field can be traced to a specific CMS dataset ID or OIG HHS file in a compliance audit, whereas a claims-derived attribute can only be traced to 'the model.' For credentialing, exclusion screening, and regulatory diligence, that citability is the deciding factor.
- Does Fonteum have post-acute provider coverage like Komodo Health?
- Yes, and it is sourced directly from CMS facility records rather than inferred from billing. Fonteum ingests CMS Care Compare for nursing homes, home health, and hospice; CMS Payroll-Based Journal (PBJ) Daily Nurse Staffing, which carries 1.3M+ daily staffing records across 14,537 Medicare-certified facilities for CY2025Q2; CMS SNF All Owners, with 280,207 ownership rows across 14,425 facilities; and CMS NH Health Deficiency Citations, with 418,148 per-survey records across 14,635 facilities. These are the federal facility-identity, ownership, staffing, and quality records — not utilization patterns inferred from claims groupings. A claims model can tell you a facility's referral volume; the federal record tells you its actual payroll-reported nurse hours, its disclosed ownership chain, and its inspection findings, each with a CMS source citation and snapshot date. That distinction is what post-acute diligence and quality analysis depend on.
- Is Fonteum's provider data free to access?
- All published research snapshots and datasets at /research are free to access and cite with attribution, with no account required for the static CSV and JSON files. This open-core posture is possible because the underlying records are federal public works under 17 U.S.C. § 105 — NPPES, PECOS, Care Compare, OIG LEIE, and the rest are not copyrightable, so Fonteum redistributes the structured, provenance-tagged versions openly. By contrast, claims-based platforms like Komodo Health require a six-figure enterprise license before any data is accessible, because the underlying claims feeds are themselves licensed assets. The Fonteum paid pilot tier ($2,500–$5,000/mo) adds custom export scoping, FHIR R4 API access for production workloads, and methodology-versioning commitments with a 30-day no-penalty exit. There is no paywalled tier for basic public-record access — the only paywall is for custom scoping and production API throughput.
- Can Fonteum support pharma or life sciences market sizing use cases?
- Fonteum covers the provider and facility identity layer — 6.8M+ NPI records with taxonomy and practice address from CMS NPPES, Medicare enrollment status from PECOS, geographic coverage and shortage-area designations from HRSA HPSA, MIPS quality scores from CMS QPP, and facility-level staffing, ownership, and quality data from CMS. It does not cover patient-level claims utilization — encounter frequency, diagnosis prevalence, or Rx volume by provider. For market-sizing work that needs patient-journey or prescribing signals, a claims analytics platform such as Komodo remains the right tool for the utilization layer. Where Fonteum fits is as the provenance-grade provider master: the citable, federally sourced identity, specialty, geography, and compliance attributes you join utilization data against. Many life-sciences teams use Fonteum as the reference spine — the clean, deduplicated, source-traced provider list — and layer claims-derived utilization on top of it.
- Why does claims-inferred provider data drift from the federal record?
- Claims-based platforms derive provider attributes from billing behavior: specialty is inferred from procedure codes, affiliation from claim groupings, and activity from encounter volume. Those inferences drift from the enrollment record in predictable ways. A physician who changes specialty emphasis, retires, or moves practices may continue to appear active in lagging claims long after their CMS PECOS enrollment or NPPES taxonomy has changed — or vice versa. Fonteum starts from the source-of-truth record instead: NPPES records the taxonomy code at enumeration (6.8M+ active providers), PECOS records current Medicare participation, and OIG LEIE records exclusions on a monthly federal refresh of 68,055+ records. Because each field is provenance-tagged with a last-checked date, you can see exactly how current the federal record is rather than trusting a billing-derived proxy. For compliance and credentialing — where screening an excluded or de-enrolled provider as active carries real liability — the federal record, not the claims inference, is the defensible basis.
- How does Fonteum surface data gaps instead of hiding them?
- Fonteum's posture is to mark silences in the federal record rather than impute over them. The clearest case is CMS SNF All Owners: 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 to make the data look complete, Fonteum flags the field with an explicit data-availability state, so an analyst knows the source itself is silent. The same discipline applies across families: CMS suppression sentinels in small-cell counts are preserved as nulls, not coerced to zero, and every rendered field carries a limitation note where one applies. This is the opposite of a claims model that produces a smooth, fully populated derived score — Fonteum shows the federal record as it actually is, gaps marked, which is what regulatory and diligence work requires.
- /sources → Full source library — 17+ federal source families with tier, refresh cadence, and limitations.
- /care-compare/nursing-homes → CMS Care Compare NH module — star ratings, staffing, health inspection history.
- /staffing → PBJ Daily Nurse Staffing — facility-level RN/LPN/CNA hours from the federal payroll record.
- /data-provenance → Field-level provenance pipeline — how every fact ties to a federal record.
- /data → Dataset catalog, B2B export concepts, and pilot pricing.