Methodology & sources

Source

Every figure on Care Atlas comes from CMS Care Compare, published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Source id src:cms:care-compare:2026. CMS Care Compare consolidates quality data from multiple CMS programs including HCAHPS patient surveys, claims-based outcome measures, and structural measures.

Grain & scope

Care Atlas covers four CMS Care Compare modules at different grains:

• Hospitals — aggregated to the state level (counts, CMS star-rating distributions, mean HCAHPS, median measure comparisons). No per-hospital pages; use CMS Care Compare for a specific hospital.
• Nursing homes — per-facility pages (CMS Five-Star ratings, payroll-based staffing hours, abuse/Special-Focus flags), one per Medicare-certified facility.
• Home-health agencies — per-agency pages with each agency's measured OASIS outcome rates placed on the national distribution.
• Outcomes — the national distribution of each measured home-health recovery across all reporting agencies.

CMS star ratings

CMS assigns an overall star rating (1–5) to eligible hospitals based on performance across quality-measure groups. Not all hospital types receive an overall star rating — psychiatric hospitals, children's hospitals, long-term care hospitals, VA/DoD facilities, and some rural emergency hospitals are excluded from the overall rating. The publishable flag in the source data filters to hospitals CMS has cleared for public reporting.

What is not in this data

• Per-hospital named pages are not published (the hospital module is state-level only — use CMS Care Compare for a specific hospital). Nursing homes and home-health agencies do have per-facility pages.
• We show only aggregate measures that are densely populated in the source. Sparse fields are omitted rather than rendered as nulls.
• Scope is the states and territories present in the CMS Care Compare dataset. Counts reflect the publishable = true filter.

L5 health information framing (hard rule)

Care Atlas is a reference catalog. Every page INFORMS and COMPARES using provenanced CMS facts and ROUTES to Medicare.gov Care Compare for action. This site NEVER diagnoses, recommends a hospital, labels any hospital "good" or "best", or substitutes for clinical judgment. This is a hard release gate enforced in copy, JSON-LD, and context.md on every page.

Current coverage: 5,432 hospitals across 56 states and territories. Data exported June 20, 2026.