About the Data

Every rating and figure on HealthCareAtlasUSA comes directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Care Compare program — the official U.S. government source for hospital quality data. We do not compute our own ratings, and we do not accept payment from any hospital to influence how it appears here.

What the star ratings mean

The "Overall Hospital Rating" is CMS's own summary measure (1 to 5 stars), built from data on mortality, safety, readmissions, patient experience and timely care. The patient-experience star ratings come from HCAHPS, a standardized survey CMS requires hospitals to run. Both are published by CMS as-is — we do not adjust or reweight them.

This is not medical advice

A high rating does not guarantee a good outcome for any individual patient, and a lower rating does not mean a hospital is unsafe — these are population-level statistics with real margins of error, some hospitals don't have enough survey responses to receive a rating at all, and every patient's situation is different. For any medical decision, talk to a doctor.

What "Better/No Different/Worse Than the National Rate" means

For mortality, safety and complication measures, CMS compares each hospital's rate to the national rate for the same condition and classifies it into one of three categories. We show that classification exactly as CMS publishes it — we do not rank hospitals by it or turn it into a score of our own.

What the readmissions ratio means

For six common conditions, CMS calculates an "excess readmission ratio": the hospital's actual 30-day readmission rate divided by the rate predicted for hospitals treating similar patients. We show that ratio exactly as CMS publishes it — 1.00 means readmissions matched the prediction, above 1.00 means more than predicted, below means fewer. We do not turn it into our own score or ranking.

What's not here yet

This version covers hospital directory info, the CMS overall rating, HCAHPS patient-experience scores, mortality/safety/complication measures, and readmissions. Clinician-level (Doctors and Clinicians) data is not included yet.

Update schedule

CMS updates Care Compare data quarterly; the underlying survey periods themselves can lag by a year or more.