Hospital star ratings, explained

The five-star overall rating you see on CareRanks comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). It's the best single summary of hospital quality that exists — and it still leaves a lot out. Here's how to read it well.

What's inside the overall star rating

CMS combines dozens of measures into five groups: mortality, safety of care, readmissions, patient experience, and timely & effective care. A hospital's performance in each group is compared with other hospitals nationally, then rolled into one score from 1 to 5 stars. Roughly speaking, 3 stars means "about average for U.S. hospitals" — not mediocre.

What it leaves out

• Your specific procedure. The overall rating averages across everything a hospital does. A 3-star hospital can be excellent at joint replacement and weak at heart care. Where CMS publishes procedure-specific measures — complication and readmission rates for hip/knee replacement, for example — we show them on the hospital profile.
• Many specialty hospitals. Psychiatric, rehab, long-term-care, and VA hospitals are rated on separate systems (we show each one's own measure set on its profile instead).
• Price. Stars say nothing about cost, and we've found no relationship between a hospital's prices and its ratings — which is exactly why comparing both matters.
• Volume for your surgeon. Hospital-level ratings don't tell you how often your surgeon performs a procedure. Our find-a-doctor panel shows each clinician's Medicare procedure volumes where CMS publishes them — research consistently links higher volumes with better outcomes for many complex procedures.

How to read a CareRanks hospital profile

1. Start with the stars — a 1–2 star hospital deserves extra scrutiny; 4–5 is a strong signal.
2. Check the measures that match your situation: having a baby? Look at C-section rates. Planned surgery? Complication and infection measures. Emergency care? ED wait times and sepsis care.
3. Read patient experience separately. It reflects communication, responsiveness, and cleanliness — things ratings composites can bury.
4. Compare two hospitals head to head. Every profile links nearby alternatives, and our comparison tool puts two side by side.
5. Then look at price. The same care at a higher price is not better care.

Where the data comes from

Every rating and measure on CareRanks is shown verbatim from CMS's published data — we don't adjust, re-weight, or invent scores. When CMS marks a measure "Not Available," we either say so or leave it off rather than guessing. Details in our methodology.

Ratings are decision support, not medical advice. For urgent or emergency care, go to the nearest emergency department — never delay emergency treatment to compare hospitals.