About the hospital quality index
Mayo Clinic’s hospital quality index is an easy-to-use, searchable database of quality and ratings for more than 5,000 hospitals across the nation.
When searching for the best care, hospital ranking lists are helpful. But with dozens of lists available, the search can be confusing.
Mayo Clinic’s hospital quality index gathers findings from various publicly available sources of hospital quality data. (See “What is the source of the data?” below.)
The information is vetted by external stakeholders, like CMS, as well as our own team of experts. The resulting index provides a broad view of hospital performance across several quality measurements.
The hospital quality index aligns with Mayo Clinic’s mission to always prioritize patient needs by connecting people with other quality institutions that deliver great care.
A hospital’s overall score percentile is an average based on its quality outcomes, patient experience, and patient safety.
For example, a facility with an overall hospital score of 75 might have the following score percentiles:
- Quality outcomes - 75
- Patient experience - 60
- Patient safety - 90
The hospitals are then ranked by percentile (0=worst; 99=best).
Learn more about the science of quality measurement.
Mayo Clinic’s hospital quality index references the following resources:
- Quality outcomes scoring is based on summary scores from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Overall Hospital Star Rating to distinguish excellence in quality.
- Patient experience scoring is based on summary scores from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) to distinguish excellence in patient experience.
- Patient safety scoring is based on six publicly reported hospital patient safety and associated infection metrics. This data allows us to emphasize the importance of patient safety.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is a federal agency that works with the healthcare community to improve quality, equity and outcomes across the nation.
CMS also calculates a summary score for each hospital, and rates performance with up to 5-Stars, based on this score.
Mayo Clinic’s hospital quality index uses the more detailed summary score ranking.
In addition, the quality index combines the CMS summary score with two other scoring systems—the HCAHPS summary score, and our own internally developed Patient Safety score.
With this combined approach, the CMS star rating is just a fraction of our score calculation.