A small rural hospital with 25 or fewer inpatient beds, located at a distance from other hospitals, paid by Medicare under a separate cost-based system.
Why this matters to you
These hospitals rarely have star ratings or complete measure sets — they treat too few patients for the statistics to be reliable, and CMS excludes them from the star rating programme by design. That absence says nothing about the care. For many rural communities a critical access hospital is the difference between 20 minutes to emergency care and two hours.
Official source
The authoritative definition and current rules are published here:
Rules and figures change. Where this page and the official source disagree, the official source is correct — and we would like to know, so please tell us.
Related terms
Important:
hospiguide.org is an independent informational resource. It is not affiliated
with, endorsed by, or connected to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
(CMS), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or Medicare.
This site does not provide medical advice and should not be used to decide
whether to seek or delay care — talk to a clinician about your situation.
Quality measures come from CMS public datasets, released August 13, 2026, and reflect
care delivered during earlier reporting periods, so they may not describe a
hospital as it operates today.
Always verify details at
Medicare.gov Care Compare
or by calling 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227).