What 13,000+ Verified Listings Reveal About Finding a Doctor in Arizona
We built the state's verified medical directory. The dataset had things to say.
When you verify every medical practice in a state's major metro against the federal NPI registry — then crawl, read, and hand-review their public information — you end up with something rarer than a directory: a census of how findable healthcare actually is.
City Select now covers 12,989 verified practices across 32 Arizona cities and 38 specialties. Here are four findings from the build, published because patients, providers, and policymakers should all find them useful — and a little uncomfortable. Every number below is computed from our live directory and checkable against it.
1. The most-asked question in healthcare is unanswered online, two times out of three
Across Arizona dental practices, 61% publish no findable insurance information — nothing on their website, or information buried beyond practical reach. Even among practices that have websites, more than half publish nothing about the plans they accept.
The consequence is a statewide game of telephone: patients calling office after office to ask the one question — do you take my plan? — that could have been a line of text. It's the single largest information gap we found, and it's why insurance filtering is a first-class feature of the directory rather than a nice-to-have.
2. About one in five dental practices is invisible online
21% of Arizona dental practices have no findable website at all. These aren't ghosts — they're licensed, federally registered, operating practices that never built a web presence. For patients, they may as well not exist; for the practices, every one of those absences is a competitor's new patient. (If that's your practice: your City Select profile now exists, verified — it's the fastest website you'll never have to build.)
3. Arizona's cosmetic-surgery capital is exactly where you think — but the concentration is startling
Scottsdale hosts 33 of the 65 registered plastic-surgery practices in our verified directory — 51% of the entire coverage area. Phoenix, a city with more than five times Scottsdale's population, hosts 24. No other specialty concentrates anywhere near this hard in one city. It's a one-number portrait of a medical economy: dense enough that patients have real choice — and real need to vet (we wrote the guide).
4. Healthcare access has a geography, and it's uneven
Phoenix and Scottsdale together account for more than 6,000 of the 12,989 verified practices — roughly 45% of the directory in two cities. Meanwhile, fast-growing communities run dramatically thinner: Queen Creek, one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the country, shows 173 verified practices — Phoenix has eighteen times that. Sun City, a retirement community with outsized medical needs, shows 148.
Growth is outrunning care in the exurbs, and the gap is measurable. Anyone planning where care is needed next — health systems, city planners, practices choosing a second location — is welcome to our numbers.
Why we're giving this away
Because original, verifiable data is what the healthcare-information space is starving for — and because we can: every figure above is computed from the live directory at cityselectmedical.com, where anyone can check it. This is the first installment; the Arizona Healthcare Access Report will follow on a recurring basis as the dataset grows statewide.
Journalists and researchers: want the underlying counts for your metro or specialty? Ask — hello@cityselectmedical.com. Attribution to City Select is all we ask.
Explore the living dataset at cityselectmedical.com — every listing NPI-verified, every promotion labeled, free for patients always.
City Select is Arizona's verified medical directory — 12,989 practices, 32 cities, 38 specialties. How we verify →