What the five CMS measure groups are, how the overall rating is built, and three things the rating does not tell you.
Medicare's Care Compare gives every US hospital an overall rating from one to five stars. It is built from five groups of measures: mortality, safety of care, hospital readmission, patient experience and timely and effective care. Each measure is compared with what CMS expects for hospitals treating similar patients, then combined.
A hospital can be strong on survival and weak on readmission. The overall rating hides that trade-off, so open the individual groups on the facility page before drawing conclusions. Small, rural and specialty hospitals are often unrated because they report too few measures — unrated is not a bad rating.
Use it as one input alongside a referral and your network. The free US Hospitals directory lists 5,888 hospitals with the measure groups, ownership, emergency-services flag and contact details, built from CMS data.
Which states have the best-rated hospitals? · Search hospitals