How this site works
Every figure and every claim on this site traces back to a source below: a public CMS dataset, a named person you can message, or a specific, quoted line from CMS's own guidance.
Who built this
PAMAwatch was built and is maintained by Dylan Merigaud. His LinkedIn profile is the way to reach him about anything on this site: a result that looks wrong, a filing that has gone stale, a paragraph that reads unclear. There is no company behind this site. It is one person's research, published under his own name.
What the public data PROVES, SUGGESTS, and cannot say
This split is the whole point of this site, not a caveat at the bottom of it. It decides every sentence the checker is allowed to write.
Proven
A lab bills Medicare under the provider type "Clinical Laboratory" (CMS Medicare Physician & Other Practitioners by Provider, CY2024) for a specific, published annual dollar amount, and CMS's CLIA Provider of Services file lists independent clinical labs as active facilities. Both are public records this checker reads directly, nothing inferred.
Suggested
A lab with Clinical-Laboratory-typed Medicare billing well above PAMA's low expenditure floor has a reasonable chance of being an applicable laboratory. That is a read of the evidence, not a determination: the floor is necessary, but it is not sufficient on its own.
Unknowable from public data
A lab's real applicable-laboratory status turns on the SHARE of its Medicare revenue coming from the CLFS and PFS combined (more than 50 percent) and on its private-payer mix, neither of which CMS publishes for any single NPI. This checker cannot see either fact, so it never states a status. It states a comparison against a public threshold and stops there.
Where the data comes from
The checker reads two public CMS datasets. The primary one is CMS data.cms.gov Medicare Physician & Other Practitioners by Provider, CY2024, dataset 8889d81e-2ee7-448f-8713-f071038289b5, filtered server-side to the "Clinical Laboratory" provider type. The second is CMS data.cms.gov Provider of Services File - Clinical Laboratories, Q2 2026, dataset 673c0328-5187-4849-a885-47459334ebe9, CMS's own CLIA Provider of Services file, joined to the first by normalized facility name and state. That join is approximate: a lab's Medicare BILLING name and its CLIA FACILITY name often differ, so it matched only 14 of 1,572 labs directly. An unmatched lab is not excluded, only shown without a CLIA cross-reference.
The exact filter
A lab appears in this site's 1,572-lab list when three conditions hold. Its Medicare billing is filed under the "Clinical Laboratory" provider type. Its name does not contain a hospital or health-system keyword, and does not match one of a list of named reference-lab chains and large-cap diagnostics companies (Labcorp, Quest/Unilab, Tempus, CareDx, Caris, Veracyte, Foundation Medicine, Myriad, and similar). And its CY2024annual Medicare Clinical Laboratory payment is at or above roughly $25,000, a doubled-threshold proxy for PAMA's $12,500-per-6-month low expenditure floor under an even-revenue- across-the-year assumption (CMS's own $12,500 figure is defined over a 6-month data collection period, and this checker only has an annual figure, so it doubles the bar rather than compare an annual number straight against a 6-month threshold).
The name-keyword filter is a heuristic, not a legal-ownership determination: it will misclassify a hospital-owned lab with a bland name as independent, and it could misclassify a genuinely independent lab whose own name happens to include a word like "regional" or "medical" as hospital-affiliated. If your lab is missing or misclassified, the LinkedIn link above is the way to flag it.
How the content on this site was written
The regulatory content on this site, this page included, is drafted with AI assistance and then checked by hand against CMS's own published guidance. Every quote on this site carries a pinpoint citation next to it. None is paraphrased from memory of the rule. If a quote and its citation ever disagree, CMS's own page is the one to trust. See CMS's CLFS PAMA reporting resources page directly for the full, current text.
What this is not
This site is independent research, not legal or financial advice, and using it creates no advisor-client relationship of any kind. It reads a lab's own public CMS Medicare billing data against PAMA's published low expenditure threshold and reports a comparison. It does not review a lab's actual revenue mix, does not review its actual compliance status, and makes no promise about whether that lab was in fact an applicable laboratory for any reporting period. Decisions about PAMA reporting obligations should be made with whoever handles your Medicare billing, not from this site alone.