Editorial policy

Hospital choice is a high-stakes decision made under stress, often by someone acting for a sick relative. That shapes every rule below.

Sourcing

• Every hospital number comes from CMS. No exceptions. If CMS does not publish it, it does not appear on a hospital page.
• Every factual claim in an article is cited to a primary source — CMS.gov, Medicare.gov, the Federal Register, or federal statute. We do not cite other hospital directories, ranking sites, hospital marketing pages, or content aggregators.
• We link to the source, not a summary of it. If a rule comes from EMTALA, we link the statute or the CMS guidance, not a blog post about it.
• Where sources disagree, we say so rather than picking the tidier answer.

What we will not publish

• Rankings or scores of our own. No "best hospitals", no composite index, no HospiGuide grade. We explain CMS data; we do not compete with it.
• Medical advice. We never tell a reader whether to seek care, delay care, accept a procedure, or choose a treatment. We explain what the data measures.
• Clinical judgements about a named hospital. We will not write that a hospital is good, bad, safe or dangerous. We publish its measures and explain how to read them.
• Invented authors or credentials. No fictional physician reviewers, no borrowed medical authority, no author photos of people who do not exist.
• Urgency or fear framing. No "the hospital near you could be killing patients" headlines. The data does not support that register, and the audience does not need it.
• Content written to fill a keyword. If we have nothing useful to say about a topic, we do not publish a page about it.

Review and freshness

• Guides carry a "last reviewed" date, not a publication date. An evergreen explanation of how star ratings work is either current or it is wrong, and a 2024 publication date tells you nothing about which.
• Blog posts carry a publication date, because they describe a moment — a data release, a policy change.
• We re-check guides when CMS changes something material. When CMS retires a measure, changes a methodology, or alters how a rating is calculated, the affected guides get revisited, not just re-dated.
• We do not bump dates without re-reading the content. A refreshed date with unchanged text is a lie told to a search engine.

Corrections

We correct errors and say that we have. Three categories, handled differently:

• Our bug — a figure that does not match CMS, a broken label, a mis-stated direction. We fix it as soon as we can verify it, and note the correction on the affected page if the error was material.
• Our interpretation was wrong — we explained a measure incorrectly. We rewrite the explanation and keep a note that it changed.
• The CMS record itself is disputed — we publish what the federal record says and point the reader to CMS. We will not remove or soften an accurate measure because a hospital objects to it.

Found something wrong? Tell us.

Advertising and independence

• No hospital can pay for anything. Not placement, not ordering, not inclusion, not removal of a measure, not a "sponsored" label.
• Advertisers see no editorial decisions before publication and have no input into them afterwards.
• Ads are physically separated from hospital contact details. On a hospital profile, advertising appears only in the sidebar, never next to an address or phone number — so no listing can read as a paid referral.
• No affiliate links in hospital data. We earn nothing from anything a reader does after leaving this site.

Who writes this

The hospiguide.org editorial team. We are researchers and writers, not clinicians, and we say so on every article rather than implying medical authority we do not have.

Our competence is narrow and specific: reading federal healthcare datasets accurately, understanding what each measure does and does not capture, and explaining that in plain English. Where a question needs clinical judgement, the honest answer is to send the reader to a clinician — and that is what we do.

Accessibility and plain language

• We write for a reader who is stressed, possibly elderly, possibly reading on a phone in a waiting room. Short sentences, concrete nouns, no jargon without a definition.
• We state the direction of every measure in words, not with colour alone, because colour fails for colour-blind readers and in screen readers.
• Every data table has proper headers and scrolls independently rather than forcing the page sideways.

Related

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