Not medical advice
Nothing on this site is medical advice. It must not be used to decide whether to seek care, to delay care, or to refuse care.
If you have a medical emergency, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department. Do not spend time comparing ratings. For time-critical conditions — heart attack, stroke, severe bleeding, difficulty breathing — reaching any hospital quickly matters far more than which hospital it is.
Quality measures describe populations, not individuals. A hospital with a below-average readmission rate may be exactly the right place for your condition, and a 5-star hospital may not perform the procedure you need. Those judgements require a clinician who knows your history.
Not affiliated with the government
hospiguide.org is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to:
- The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
- Medicare or the Medicare program
- The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
- Any U.S. federal, state or local government agency
We use CMS public data because it is public. That use implies no relationship with CMS and no approval by CMS of anything we publish. For official information, go to Medicare.gov Care Compare or call 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227), TTY 1-877-486-2048.
Not a rating service
We publish no ratings, rankings or scores of our own. Every star rating, rate, percentage and ratio on this site is calculated and published by CMS.
The only figure we calculate is the national median used in comparison labels, and those labels say "compared with the national median" so you know which comparisons are ours and which are CMS's. See our methodology.
A hospital appearing on this site is certified by Medicare. That is an administrative status, not a quality endorsement — neither by CMS nor by us.
Limits of the data
It describes the past
CMS refreshes hospital data roughly quarterly, and each measure covers a reporting period that closed months before publication. Mortality measures often span three years of care. The data currently on this site was released by CMS on August 13, 2026. A hospital that has changed leadership, opened a new unit, or lost experienced staff since then looks identical here.
It may contain errors
CMS datasets contain mistakes — wrong phone numbers, outdated addresses, occasionally miscoded measures. We reproduce what CMS publishes without correcting it, because inventing corrections would be worse. Verify details that matter directly with the hospital or with Medicare.
It is incomplete by design
Many hospitals show "not reported" for many measures. Usually this means CMS withheld a result because there were too few cases for it to be statistically reliable — common at small and rural hospitals, and not a quality signal. Roughly two in five hospitals have no overall star rating at all.
It covers mostly Medicare patients
Most measures are built from Medicare claims, describing care for patients aged 65 and over. Paediatric care, maternity care and care for younger adults are largely invisible in this data.
It cannot see everything that matters
Risk adjustment accounts for age, sex and diagnosed conditions. It does not account for poverty, housing, language, transport, or whether a patient has someone at home to help. Hospitals serving disadvantaged communities often look worse on measures like readmission for reasons that begin outside the hospital.
No professional relationship
Reading this site creates no doctor-patient, advisory or professional relationship of any kind. We provide no insurance advice, legal advice, or financial advice. Articles about hospital billing and patient rights describe how federal rules generally work; they are not advice about your situation, and rules change.
External links
We link to Medicare.gov, CMS.gov and other third-party sites for verification. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for their content or availability. Links are not endorsements.
No warranty
This site is provided "as is". We make no warranty that the information is accurate, complete, current or fit for any particular purpose, and we accept no liability for decisions made on the basis of it. Where law does not permit excluding liability, our liability is limited to the minimum the law allows.
Advertising
This site is supported by display advertising. Advertisers have no influence over which hospitals appear, how they are ordered, or which measures we show. No hospital pays for placement. Ads are kept away from hospital contact details so that no listing can be mistaken for a paid referral. See our editorial policy.
Questions or corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us. See also our privacy policy and terms of use.