Measure explainer
Timely & Effective Care
How consistently hospitals follow recommended care processes — for example, giving heart-attack patients aspirin on arrival, or the average time spent in the emergency department.
How CMS calculates it
These process measures track adherence to evidence-based care for conditions like sepsis, stroke, heart attack, and emergency department throughput. For most measures, higher percentages are better; for wait-time measures, lower is better.
Why it matters
These measures give patients, clinicians, and hospital boards a standardized way to compare care quality across facilities. For timely & effective care, the general rule is higher is better (unless a wait time). Always weigh a single measure alongside the full picture — case-mix, hospital size, and whether the measure is publicly reported for the hospital in question.
How to read the scores on this site
- Score: the hospital's reported value.
- Compared to national: better than, no different from, or worse than the US average, with a color dot and text label.
- Sample: the denominator or number of cases the score is based on. Larger samples are more statistically reliable.