Gannett News Service analyzed information about thousands of hospitals to help you determine which hospitals in your area are most likely to provide the most effective treatments for heart attacks and heart failure.
Click the arrows below to find out more about the methodology that was used to compile this database.
We measured how often hospitals gave recommended treatments for patients who came in with heart attacks and heart failure.
Medical evidence says patients who receive recommended treatments are more likely have positive outcomes.
We used composite scoring, an approach that also has been used by government and independent researchers to measure how well hospitals perform in giving recommended treatments. In composite scoring, the numbers of patients who were given each type of treatment are added together. The numbers of patients eligible to receive each of those treatments are added together, too.
For each hospital, the first sum is divided by the second. The result is a composite score. Following guidelines used in government and industry, we generated composite scores only for those hospitals that had at least 30 patients in the second sum described above.
We took all the hospitals for which we could calculate composite scores and ranked the scores from highest to lowest. Once ranked, we divided them into five equal groups, and awarded stars on the basis of those groups.
For example, a hospital whose score falls into the top group — the top 20 percent of the composite scores - receives five stars. For state-level star ratings, composite scores are ranked within each state.
The data cover hospital admissions between October 2004 and September 2005 and reflect government data released in June, 2006.
Raw data, which are updated regularly, may be downloaded at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov
Descriptive information about the hospitals, such as their bed count, medical school affiliation and urban-rural status, comes from other databases available from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Demographic data about hospitals' home counties is from Claritas Inc., a California market research firm.
For more information about terminology used in this report, consult our glossary page.