Frequently Asked Questions

Is this medical advice?

No. HealthCareAtlasUSA republishes official quality data from Medicare's Care Compare program. It cannot tell you which hospital is right for your condition. Use it as background and talk to your doctor about where to get care.

Where do the ratings and measures come from?

Everything comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS): the overall star rating and hospital directory, HCAHPS patient-experience scores, mortality/safety/complication measures, 30-day readmissions, and Timely & Effective Care measures such as emergency-department wait times and sepsis care. We publish CMS figures as-is and do not reweight or re-score them.

What does the CMS overall star rating include?

CMS combines up to 46 individual measures across mortality, safety, readmission, patient experience and timely/effective care into a single one-to-five-star summary. Not every hospital reports every measure, so ratings are not available for some hospitals. CMS, not this site, calculates the stars.

What is the 'median time in the emergency department'?

It is the typical (median) number of minutes patients who were treated and sent home spent in the emergency department, as reported to CMS. A separate measure covers psychiatric and mental-health patients. Longer times are not automatically 'bad' — busy trauma centers often run longer — but the figure is useful context.

How current is the data?

CMS refreshes Care Compare roughly quarterly, and the measurement periods behind each measure can themselves lag by a year or more. Each measure on a hospital page shows its data period.

Is the doctor directory linked to the hospital ratings?

No. The clinician directory comes from a separate CMS dataset keyed by National Provider Identifier. A doctor listed at a practice address is not a statement about the quality of any hospital shown here.

Is HealthCareAtlasUSA affiliated with CMS or Medicare?

No. It is an independent reference site built on public CMS data and is not endorsed by or affiliated with CMS or Medicare.

Full method notes are on the About the Data page. This site is not medical advice.