Data sources

All hospital data on hospiguide.org comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. These are public-domain U.S. federal datasets, published through the same programme that powers Medicare.gov Care Compare.

Primary source

CMS Provider Data Catalog — data.cms.gov/provider-data/topics/hospitals

We read dataset locations from the CMS metadata registry on every import rather than storing a fixed URL, because CMS changes the file path with each release. That means we always take the file CMS currently considers authoritative for a given dataset.

Datasets we import

Hospital General Information

The base record for every hospital. The overall star rating lives here, as do the counts of how many measures in each category were better, no different, or worse than the national average. Note that CMS retired its "mortality national comparison" style columns in 2021 — what exists now is these counts.

Patient Survey (HCAHPS)

HCAHPS surveys only adult patients who stayed at least one night, and response rates are typically well under half. Patients with unusually good or bad stays are more likely to reply. Children's hospitals and most outpatient care are not covered.

Timely and Effective Care

A mix of timing measures (ER wait times) and process measures (whether the recommended steps of care were completed). Direction of "good" differs per measure, which is why we label each one individually. Several measures were paused nationally during the COVID-19 emergency and still show gaps.

Complications and Deaths

Mortality and complication rates are risk-adjusted for age, sex and conditions present on admission — but not for income, housing, or social support. Measures cover Medicare patients, so they describe care for people 65 and over.

Unplanned Hospital Visits

Counts returns to any hospital within 30 days, not just the one that discharged the patient. A high rate can reflect a community with poor access to follow-up care as much as the hospital itself.

Healthcare Associated Infections

Reported as standardized infection ratios: 1.00 means as many infections as expected for this hospital's patient mix and device use, below 1.00 means fewer. Hospitals with few eligible cases have results suppressed, which is why small hospitals often show nothing here.

Medicare Spending Per Beneficiary

Medicare Spending Per Beneficiary measures what Medicare paid, not what a patient pays. Lower spending is not automatically better care — it can reflect efficiency, or under-treatment.

Outpatient Imaging Efficiency

Outpatient imaging efficiency flags scans that are rarely necessary, such as doing an abdominal CT both with and without contrast. Only a handful of measures, and many hospitals report none.

What we do not use

Being explicit about absent sources matters as much as listing the present ones:

• No commercial data vendors. Nothing here is licensed from a third-party healthcare data broker.
• No hospital-supplied data. Hospitals cannot submit, correct or supplement their listing with us. The federal record is the record.
• No user reviews or crowd ratings. We collect none and display none.
• No scraped content. We do not copy from other hospital directories, ranking sites, or hospital marketing pages.
• No web-search or AI-generated statistics. Every number on this site traces to a dataset listed above.

Licensing

CMS datasets are works of the U.S. federal government and are in the public domain. We reproduce the data values unchanged; the explanatory text, labels and comparisons on this site are our own work.

Nothing about our use of this data implies CMS endorsement. See our disclaimer.

Reproducing our figures

Every value on a hospital page can be checked against Medicare.gov Care Compare using the hospital's CMS Certification Number, which we display on each profile. If a figure here disagrees with Care Compare, tell us — that is a bug on our side.

For how we calculate the national medians used in comparison labels, see our methodology.