Using Pharos

Pharos does not give medical advice and does not recommend a course of care. Nothing here should be used to decide whether to have a procedure, or to delay or forgo care your clinician has advised. Those decisions belong with you and your clinician.

Pharos does not give insurance advice. Only your insurer can tell you what your plan covers and what it requires of you, including whether a referral or prior authorization is needed.

Facility names, addresses and other details come from public federal datasets that facilities maintain themselves.

Whether a facility appears for your plan comes from datasets published by the insurance companies themselves, which federal Transparency in Coverage rules require them to make public.

We receive nothing from facilities. No facility submits information to us, pays to appear in your results, or pays for its position in them.

Your results are not a complete list of the facilities that could perform your procedure.

A facility appears only if its insurance company has published a current agreement covering that procedure, under the specific plan and network you selected. A facility that performs your procedure and accepts your plan will not appear if no such agreement has been published — and many have not been.

Your results are also limited to facilities within a set distance of the address you give us, and to organizations rather than individual clinicians.

Absence from your results is not evidence that a facility cannot help you. If somewhere is not listed, ask them directly.

What we show reflects what was on file when we assembled it. The published filings are a snapshot; they contain errors and gaps we cannot fully resolve, and they can lag changes. Facility details come from registries that can be stale.

We take a facility to be in your network because an agreement covering it has been published. We do not confirm that with your insurer, and network membership can change at any time.

Distances are straight-line estimates measured from the address you give us. They are not driving distances and take no account of roads, traffic or parking.

Your plan’s own benefits, the services actually performed on the day, and details of your specific plan that the published files do not capture can all differ from what we show. Always confirm with the facility and your insurer before you schedule.

Pharos is a nonprofit research project, offered free of charge and provided “as is,” without warranties of any kind. We do not guarantee that it is accurate, complete, current, or available at any given time.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not responsible or liable for any loss or harm arising from your use of Pharos, from information it shows you, or from decisions made in reliance on it. Your use of Pharos is subject to these terms and to our privacy practices.

We may update these terms as Pharos changes. The date below is when this page was last revised.