PlainHospital publishes a quality and safety profile for every Medicare-certified hospital that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services tracks — built entirely from official CMS, FDA, and VA data. This page explains how those pages are produced, what standards they are held to, and how to report a number that looks wrong so we can fix it at the source.

How these pages are produced

Every star rating, patient-experience score, infection rate, readmission figure, and device adverse-event count on PlainHospital originates in an official government dataset. We download the raw data files and pull the public catalogs, load them through a documented, version-controlled data pipeline, and render them into hospital, state, ranking, and device pages using shared templates. No hospital page is hand-written, and no rating, survey score, or infection rate is typed in by an editor. Each figure you see is read directly from the official source record at build time.

Our editorial team is responsible for the parts a pipeline cannot decide on its own: which datasets to use, how each measure is defined and labeled, what the methodology says, how derived measures (such as a state average or a hospital-versus-national comparison) are computed, which guides and explainers we write, and what we will not publish. The pipeline then applies those decisions uniformly across every hospital, so the rule that governs one page governs all of them.

Sourcing standards

We publish only data that comes from official government sources, and we name the source on every page. Our data is:

• CMS Hospital Compare: the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services quality program — overall star ratings, HCAHPS patient-experience survey results, healthcare-associated infection rates (CDC NHSN), unplanned readmission and mortality rates, timely-and-effective-care measures, and Medicare spending per beneficiary, published through the CMS Provider Data Catalog. It is the source for every rating and quality measure on the site.
• FDA MAUDE: the Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience database of medical-device adverse-event reports, used for our device-safety and manufacturer pages.
• VA Facility Data: the Department of Veterans Affairs directory of VA medical centers and facilities, used for the VA section.

We do not scrape third-party review sites, we do not republish self-reported patient ratings as our own, and we do not assign our own quality or safety scores on top of the government data. Where a figure is derived from the official data (for example, a state average or a hospital-versus-national comparison), the page links to our methodology, which sets out exactly how it is calculated.

Accuracy and validation

Because the numbers are read straight from CMS, FDA, and VA files, the most common limitation is the underlying data itself rather than a transcription error. Star ratings depend on a hospital reporting enough measures to qualify; survey results reflect the patients who responded; and adverse-event reports are submitted by manufacturers, facilities, and the public and are not confirmed defect rates. Our pipeline applies systematic checks before a value is published: it counts only ratings the source actually assigned (never treating an unrated hospital as a zero), shows a value as unavailable when the source omits it, and reconciles hospital, state, and national rollups so the same figure is consistent wherever it appears.

When we find that a displayed number is wrong, we fix the cause, not the symptom. We trace the value back to the data layer, correct the derivation or labeling rule there, and regenerate the affected pages, so the same class of error is resolved everywhere at once rather than patched on a single page.

Editorial independence

PlainHospital does not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from any hospital, health system, or organization in exchange for how a facility is presented. We do not assign our own ratings or endorsements. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense. Advertisers have no influence over which hospitals we cover, how a rating or infection measure is reported, or how any page ranks.

Update schedule

CMS refreshes Hospital Compare data periodically, typically on a quarterly basis, and FDA adds new device reports on a rolling basis. We refresh our database from the latest official exports and re-stamp the affected pages so the published date reflects when the data genuinely changed. Because measures such as infection and mortality rates are pooled over multiple collection periods by the source, the figures on a page reflect the reporting window CMS used in its most recent release.

Corrections process

If a figure looks wrong, please tell us. We treat data-error reports as a priority and follow the same process every time:

1. Report. Email hello@plainhospital.com with the page URL and the figure you are questioning.
2. Verify. We check the value against the official CMS, FDA, or VA source record for that hospital, state, or device.
3. Fix at the source. If the figure is wrong on our side, we correct the underlying data or derivation rule and regenerate every page it affects.
4. Note it. If the figure is correct but reflects a known limitation — an unrated hospital, a low survey response, or a pooled multi-year measure — we explain the caveat rather than silently changing it.

Some apparent errors trace back to the CMS record itself. When that is the case, we will tell you so and, where possible, point you to the official Medicare Care Compare tool so you can verify it directly.

Contact

Questions about our standards, methodology, or a specific figure are welcome at hello@plainhospital.com. For more on what the data covers and how it is processed, see our About page and methodology. For how to use this information responsibly when choosing or assessing a hospital, see our disclaimer.