Hospital Compare

Hospital Compare has information about the quality of care at over 4,000 Medicare-certified hospitals across the country. You can use Hospital Compare to find hospitals and compare the quality of their care.

The information on Hospital Compare:

Can help you make decisions about where you get your health care;
Encourages hospitals to improve the quality of care they provide.

Remember, in an emergency, you should go to the nearest hospital. When you can plan ahead, discuss the information you find here with your health care provider to decide which hospital will best meet your health care needs.

Some of the criteria:

Patient Survey Results

HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) is a national survey that asks patients about their experiences during a recent hospital stay. Use the results shown here to compare hospitals based on ten important hospital quality topics.

Timely & Effective Care

These measures show how often hospitals provide care that research shows gets the best results for patients with certain conditions. This information can help you compare which hospitals give recommended care most often as part of the overall care they provide to patients.

Readmissions, Complications and Deaths

Patients who are admitted to the hospital for treatment of medical problems sometimes get other serious injuries, complications, or conditions, and may even die. Some patients may experience problems soon after they are discharged and need to be admitted to the hospital again. These events can often be prevented if hospitals follow best practices for treating patients.

Use of Medical Imaging (tests like Mammograms, MRIs, and CT scans)

These measures give you information about hospitals' use of medical imaging tests for outpatients based on the following:
Protecting patients’ safety, such as keeping patients’ exposure to radiation and other risks as low as possible.
Following up properly when screening tests such as mammograms show a possible problem.
Avoiding the risk, stress, and cost of doing imaging tests that patients may not need.


Spending per hospital patient with Medicare

The "Spending per Hospital Patient with Medicare" measure shows whether Medicare spends more, less or about the same per Medicare patient treated in a specific hospital, compared to how much Medicare spends per patient nationally. This measure includes any Medicare Part A and Part B payments made for services provided to a patient during the 3 days prior to the hospital stay, during the stay, and during the 30 days after discharge from the hospital.

Number of Medicare patients treated

This shows the number of Medicare patients with a certain condition (MS-DRG) that a hospital treated during the current data collection period. These data are based on the number of Medicare patients that were discharged with a certain condition. They do not include patients in Medicare Health Plans.