Hospital quality measures indicate how well a hospital provides care for its patients. While the measures presented here have been proven to be among the most useful indicators of quality care, a hospital's overall quality cannot be expressed by its scores on these measures alone.
You are encouraged to use the information available here to begin conversations with your doctor, hospital representatives, or other health care professionals; as well as with family members, friends, and associates who may have direct experience with a hospital. We have provided a checklist of other information that can be of value when choosing a hospital.
If you have a complaint about the quality of the medical care you or a loved one received at a hospital, first contact the hospital's patient advocate or contact your state Quality Improvement Organization.
How Hospital Quality is Determined
This Web site uses data collected by the New York State Department of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, IPRO, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Due to the nature of these sources, some measures are presented differently than others.
- Percent: Scores with a percent sign are simple percentages. For example, 20% may be the proportion of patients (80 out of 400 patients).
- Rates: Scores marked as rates are the number of times something occurred divided by 1,000. For example, 20 infections per 1,000 hours = 0.02.
- Ratio: Scores marked as ratios are compared to a national standard rate of 1.0. For example, a hospital scoring 0.8 is less than the national standard 1.0.
Where possible, we analyze the variation of these scores to see if any scores are significantly better than or worse than the national or state average. If we find a significant variation, we mark it with a green symbol (“better than”) or a red symbol (“worse than”). For some measures, a higher score is better; for others, lower is better. The better-performing scores on this website are at the top of the list, and green always signifies higher performance than the national rate.
If national data are available, the New York hospital score will be compared to all hospitals in the United States. If data is only available from New York, hospitals are compared only to other hospitals in New York.
For additional details, read Methodology and Sources.