HealthCareAtlasUSA

This site republishes official CMS/Medicare Care Compare data. It is not medical advice and does not recommend any specific hospital or treatment — for medical decisions, talk to a doctor.

States / Glossary

Glossary

Plain-language definitions of the hospital-quality terms used across HealthCareAtlasUSA. These explain what CMS measures — they are not medical advice.

Care Compare (Hospital Compare)
The official Medicare website and open dataset where the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) publish quality measures for hospitals, nursing homes and other providers. Every hospital figure on this site comes from the Care Compare data files.
Overall hospital star rating
A 1-to-5 summary CMS calculates from dozens of underlying measures grouped into mortality, safety, readmission, patient experience and timely & effective care. It is a relative ranking against other hospitals, updated roughly yearly, and not every hospital has enough data to receive one.
HCAHPS (patient experience survey)
The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems — a standardized national survey of recently discharged patients about communication with nurses and doctors, responsiveness, cleanliness, quietness and whether they would recommend the hospital. Results are reported as "top-box" percentages (the most positive response).
30-day readmission rate
The share of patients treated for a given condition who were admitted again to any hospital within 30 days. CMS reports it risk-adjusted and compares it to the national rate as "better", "no different" or "worse" than expected. Lower is better.
30-day mortality rate
The risk-adjusted share of patients who died within 30 days of admission for conditions such as heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia or stroke. Risk adjustment accounts for how sick patients were on arrival so hospitals treating sicker patients are not unfairly penalized. Lower is better.
Risk-adjusted / risk-standardized
A statistical correction that levels the playing field by accounting for differences in patients' age and other diagnoses. It lets a small community hospital and a large referral center be compared on outcomes without one looking worse simply because its patients were older or sicker.
Timely & effective care
A group of process measures on how quickly and consistently a hospital delivers recommended care — emergency-department wait times, sepsis bundle completion, safe opioid prescribing, immunization. Reported as percentages or median minutes; the right direction depends on the measure.
Sepsis bundle (SEP-1)
A CMS measure of whether a hospital completed every recommended step — blood cultures, lactate testing, antibiotics, fluids — within the required time window for patients with severe sepsis or septic shock. Higher completion is better.
Emergency department (ED) wait time
CMS measures such as median time from arrival to being seen, and time spent in the ED before being sent home. Shorter times generally indicate a less crowded, faster-moving department; they say nothing about the quality of the treatment itself.
Safety of care
The star-rating group covering hospital-acquired conditions — infections (central-line, catheter, surgical-site, MRSA, C. diff), pressure ulcers, falls and serious complications. It reflects harm that happens during a hospital stay rather than the condition the patient came in with.
CMS Certification Number (CCN)
The six-character identifier CMS assigns to each Medicare-certified hospital. It is how a facility's measures are linked across the Care Compare files and is used as the hospital's ID in this site's URLs.
NPI (National Provider Identifier)
A unique 10-digit number assigned to every U.S. health-care provider — individual clinicians and organizations — by the NPPES registry. The doctor pages on this site are keyed by NPI.
Provider taxonomy / specialty
A standardized code and label describing a clinician's type and specialization (for example "Internal Medicine" or "Orthopaedic Surgery"), recorded in the NPPES registry. A provider can list more than one; the primary taxonomy is shown first.
"Not Available" / "Number too small"
CMS suppresses a measure when a hospital had too few cases for a statistically reliable result, or did not submit the data. A blank is not a zero and not a bad score — it means the measure cannot be reported for that hospital this cycle.

More on sources, how current the data is, and its limits on the About the Data page and the FAQ.