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Choosing a Good Hospital

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Use our hospital Ratings to find a good hospital in your area. Even if you don't have a choice in hospitals, our Ratings can help you identify and be prepared for any potential problems at the hospital you do go to.

We rate hospitals using three major measures:

• Patient experience: Based on a government survey of millions of patients, these Ratings tell you whether patients would recommend the hospital, their overall assessment of it, and their experience with topics such as communication with doctors and nurses, pain control, and whether their rooms were kept clean and quiet. Read more.


• Patient outcomes: These Ratings, based on data submitted by hospitals to the federal government, states or the nonprofit Leapfrog group, provide information on how well hospitals prevent bloodstream and surgical-site infections, and the chance that patients have to be readmitted to a hospital within 30 days of their initial discharge. The need for such readmission can indicate problems in care while the patient was first hospitalized, including a hospital-acquired infection. Read more.


• Hospital Practices: Two measures are included under this heading, the use of electronic health records, and the appropriate use of CT scanning. The Ratings for electronic health records are based on a survey of hospitals conducted by the American Hospital Association on the extent to which a hospital uses a computerized system for documenting physicans' and nurses' notes, viewing lab reports, and other purposes. The Ratings for CT scanning comes from billing data submitted to CMS that calculates the percent of scans of the abdomen and chest that are performed twice, once with and once without a dye. Such scans usually aren't necessary and can expose you to unnecessary radiation.


• Safety score: This is a summary of several key categories related to hospital safety: avoiding infections, avoiding readmissions, communicating about new medications and discharge, appropriate use of chest and abdominal CT scanning, avoiding serious complications, and avoiding mortality. The score is expressed on 100-point scale. A hospital would score 100 if it earned the highest possible score in all measures and would score 1 if it earned the lowest scores in all measures. All of the categories are worth 20 points except for avoiding complications and avoiding mortality, each of which are worth 10 points. Read more.