Medical Disclaimer

ForThePatient.org Scores Are Not Medical Advice

The quality scores, component breakdowns, enforcement information, and other data displayed on ForThePatient.org are intended to provide general informational context about healthcare facilities. They are derived from statistical analysis of public government data and represent aggregate historical performance — not a prediction of the care any individual patient will receive.

Our scores do not evaluate individual physicians, specific procedures, or your personal medical situation. A facility with a high score may still have departments or service lines that perform below average. A facility with a low score may have outstanding specialists in the area most relevant to your needs.

No quality score from any organization — ours, CMS, Leapfrog, Healthgrades, or U.S. News — can fully capture the complex, multidimensional nature of healthcare quality.

Always Consult Your Healthcare Providers

Before making any healthcare decisions — including which facility to visit, which procedure to undergo, or which provider to see — you should consult with your physician, specialist, or other qualified healthcare professional. Your provider understands your medical history, current condition, insurance coverage, and individual needs in ways that no rating system can.

ForThePatient.org is designed to be one input among many in your decision-making process. It should complement — not replace — the advice of your healthcare team.

Data Sources & Time Lag

All quality scores on ForThePatient.org are derived from data published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) through the Provider Data Catalog. This data is based on government-mandated reporting by Medicare-certified healthcare facilities.

Important limitations of this data:

• Time lag. CMS data typically reflects conditions 3–6 months before publication. A facility may have improved or declined since the data was collected. Our exponential recency decay helps mitigate this, but cannot eliminate it.
• Reporting periods. Many CMS measures are calculated over rolling 12–36 month windows, which means short-term changes may not be immediately visible.
• Coverage gaps. Some facilities report on only a subset of available measures. Small-volume facilities may have measures suppressed for statistical reliability. New facilities may lack sufficient data for scoring.
• Data errors. While CMS maintains rigorous data quality processes, errors in the underlying data can and do occur. If you identify what appears to be a data error, please use our dispute process.

The "Unrated" Classification

A facility may be classified as Unrated for several reasons:

• The facility is newly certified and has not yet completed a full reporting cycle.
• The facility serves a very small patient volume, and CMS suppresses its measures for statistical reliability.
• The facility type has limited available quality measures in the current CMS data release.
• Data for the facility was missing or incomplete in the most recent CMS publication.

Unrated facilities still appear on the ForThePatient.org map (shown in gray) so that patients can see they exist and access their address, contact information, and any contextual data that is available. Approximately 4,914 facilities (about 10% of the total) carry the Unrated classification.

Limitations of Quality Scores

Healthcare quality is inherently multidimensional and difficult to reduce to a single number. While our composite scores are designed to provide useful, transparent benchmarks, users should be aware of these limitations:

• Aggregation obscures variation. A composite score averages across components. A facility with an excellent infection rate but poor patient experience will receive a moderate score that may obscure both its strengths and weaknesses. We publish component-level scores to address this, but patients should review individual components relevant to their needs.
• Risk adjustment is imperfect. CMS applies risk adjustment to many measures, but no adjustment method perfectly accounts for differences in patient population, case complexity, or socioeconomic factors. Teaching hospitals and safety-net hospitals, in particular, may score lower in certain measures due to the complexity of their patient populations rather than lower quality of care.
• Measures lag innovation. CMS quality measures may not capture the latest clinical innovations, technologies, or care models. A facility using cutting-edge approaches may not yet be measured on those capabilities.
• Our methodology reflects our judgments. The component weights and scoring decisions in our methodology reflect our best assessment of what matters for patient outcomes. Reasonable people may disagree with our choices. Our methodology is published in full so that users, researchers, and facilities can evaluate our approach and submit disputes if they believe changes are warranted.

Medical Emergencies

In a medical emergency, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department. Do not use ForThePatient.org to select a facility during an emergency. Emergency care decisions should be based on proximity and the immediate clinical capabilities of the nearest facility, not on quality scores.

Reporting Errors

If you believe any information on ForThePatient.org is incorrect — whether a score, a data point, a facility name or address, or an enforcement action — please submit a report through our dispute process. We commit to investigating all reports within 30 days and publishing our resolution.

For general questions about our data or methodology, contact us at hello@forthepatient.org.