Methodology

Quality ratings

The headline star rating on each acute-care hospital profile is the official CMS Overall Hospital Quality Star Rating, published quarterly by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. We display this rating verbatim — we do not adjust or re-weight it.

Specialty facilities (children's hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, long-term acute care hospitals, and Veterans Affairs medical centers) are not assigned CMS star ratings. Their profiles show measures from the quality program appropriate to the facility type.

Price transparency grades

Each hospital is graded A–F based on the completeness, freshness, and machine-readability of its publicly-published price transparency file (MRF). Grade criteria are independent from quality ratings — a hospital can be highly rated on quality and poorly rated on transparency, or vice versa.

Procedure-level pricing

Procedure pages aggregate published gross charges, cash prices, and negotiated rates from each hospital's MRF. Where data is incomplete or absent, we say so explicitly rather than guess.

Updates

Quality data is refreshed each calendar quarter as CMS publishes new Hospital Compare releases. Price transparency data is refreshed on a rolling basis as hospitals update their MRF files.

Related: About CareRanks · Data sources