A number of organizations release ratings for U.S. hospitals each year to help patients make decisions about where to receive care.
Each organization assesses hospitals using its own methodology, meaning a facility rated highly by one may carry a lower score with another. To help readers easily weigh these valuations across hospitals, the Tribune created the searchable database below using reports from three prominent sources: U.S. News & World Report, the Leapfrog Group and Medicare.gov.
Here’s a breakdown of what the ratings mean and how they’re calculated. Use the searchable database to see where each Illinois hospital ranked across the three reports.
U.S. News & World Report
U.S. News & World Report releases a list every year ranking the top hospitals overall in the state as well as across certain specialties, like cancer, cardiology, neurology and orthopedics.
For 2024, only 23 hospitals were ranked overall in Illinois. These number rankings, not including other specialties, are featured in the database below.
Leapfrog
The Leapfrog Group semiannually releases a report on hospital safety, awarding medical facilities a letter grade from A to F based on 22 measures of safety, including hand hygiene, falls and trauma, and death rates among surgical patients with serious but treatable complications.
The group recently released its spring 2024 report, which assessed close to 170 hospitals across the state, scoring approximately 110 of them. The remaining locations were given an “NG” grade to indicate they were not graded by Leapfrog.
Medicare.gov
The federal health insurance program publishes two rating metrics: an overall star rating, based on how well a hospital performs across five categories, and a patient survey rating, which comes from surveys given to patients about their care experience.
For the database below, the Tribune used the hospitals’ overall star rating. Medicare calculates that rating using factors such as death rates, safety of care, readmission rates, patient experience, and timely and effective care. Hospitals can receive between one to five stars, based on how well they performed compared with other U.S. hospitals. The more stars, the better the hospital scored across those five areas. In instances where Medicare did not evaluate a medical center or there was not enough data available to give an overall star rating, the entry will read “not available.”
Search the database to see each medical facility’s rating and compare Illinois hospitals.