Money’s ranking of the best hospitals for bariatric surgery whittles down the glut of hospitals that provide weight-loss treatment into a list of 75 of the highest-quality institutions in the nation.

Our methodological approach favors facilities that have received strong quality care and patient ratings from the federal Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as well as accreditation in metabolic and bariatric care from the American College of Surgeons.

Our data partners for this ranking were Denniston Data and Definitive Healthcare. We also relied on publicly available data from the ACS.

Here’s a detailed look at how we arrived at our top 75 choices.

Setting a strict benchmark

First, to be considered among the nation’s top facilities for bariatric care, a hospital must have met key standards of care that demonstrate it specializes in performing high-quality weight-loss surgeries.

We began by limiting the list to short-term, acute-care hospitals that have received a quality rating of three-stars or higher from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

The CMS rating (included on the hospitals ranking as “Federal Rating”) is based on five key factors that are weighted as follows:

  • Mortality (22%): reflects the death rates related to cardiovascular issues, strokes, pneumonia and treatable complications after surgery
  • Safety (22%): tracks the rate of infections associated with certain surgeries, IVs and catheters and rates of complications after specific procedures
  • Readmission (22%): considers how often some patients are readmitted to the hospital, along with how long they stayed and whether there were unplanned visits for outpatient treatment
  • Patient experience (22%): gauges whether patients had a positive experience based on their self-reported ratings of how well their doctors and nurses communicated with them; other factors include whether their bathroom was clean and their room was quiet at night
  • Timely and effective care (12%): estimates how quickly patients received care for chest pain or strokes; how long they stayed during an ER visit; percent of health care staff who are vaccinated for flu and COVID-19 and other time-sensitive metrics

We used another key filter to home in on hospitals that specialize in bariatric surgeries. Several studies show that the more experienced a physician is with a certain procedure, the better the health outcome for the patient. Bariatric procedures — especially gastric-band and bypass surgeries — are no exception. These procedures are often done by general surgeons and in an outpatient setting.

As such, a hospital must have performed outpatient bariatric procedures equivalent to 1% of all surgeries — or at least 50 bariatric surgeries — in 2022 to be considered.

Together, these filters yielded a short list of 124 hospitals.

Rewarding stand-out bariatric care

Next, the facilities that met this strict benchmark were given a hospital-level score, displayed on the ranking as the “Bariatric Grade.”

The letter grade is based on a numerical ranking score that follows this range:

  • A+ is a CRS score of 95% to 100%.
  • A is 85% to 94.99%.
  • A- is 80% to 84.99%.
  • B+ is 75% to 79.99%.
  • B is 65% to 74.99%.
  • B- is CRS 60% to 64.99%.
  • C+ is 55% to 59.99%.
  • C is 45% to 54.99%.
  • C- is 40% to 49.99%.
  • D+ is 35% to 39.99%.
  • D is 25% to 34.99%.
  • D- is 20% to 24.99%.
  • F is below 20%.

The factors that determined a hospital’s numerical ranking score were its CMS scores, weighted at 45%, and its bariatric specialty, weighted at 55%.

The CMS scores include the star ratings for quality and patient experience, which gauge not only how safe a hospital is but also how patients feel about the care they received.

For the bariatric specialty portion, we rewarded hospitals that were accredited through the Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Accreditation and Quality Improvement Program run by the American College of Surgeons and the American Society for Metability and Bariatric Surgery.

This core ranking factor also favored facilities that doubled or even tripled our benchmarks for performing bariatric procedures, as determined by an algorithmic estimation via our data partner Definitive Healthcare that considers both Medicare and private insurance claims for bariatric procedures.

Given the propensity for cardiac-related comorbidities, we also preferred facilities that routinely perform heart-stress tests before outpatient surgery to ensure the patient’s body can handle the procedure. And, if so, whether the hospital performs stress tests more often than the median of our shortlisted facilities.

Measuring price transparency

As an additional criterion, Money included its novel Price Transparency grade for each hospital we ranked.

Keep in mind: This financial metric is unweighted and does not contribute to a hospital's overall grade or position on our rankings.

Still, we display the score because we consider the ability to accurately know in advance what a procedure or visit will cost you to be vital to avoiding surprises and accurately planning the cost of a hospital stay.

Here’s how we calculated the score: Using data and feedback from Denniston and the nonprofit RAND Health Care, Money analyzed the extent to which a hospital’s publicly listed prices (known as chargemaster prices) accurately align with the revenue the hospital receives from patients, insurance companies or Medicare.

In effect, we wanted to know: Is the listed price similar to the amount that you’re billed after you’re discharged?

We used two ratios to measure this. The first compares the hospital's chargemaster prices and its gross patient revenue, whether paid by uninsured patients or insurance companies; the second ratio is between the gross billed amount and the total amount approved by Medicare. Weighted equally, these ratios were standardized on a 100-point scale and translated into a letter grade based on the same ranges as listed above.

In almost all cases, patients pay less — and often far less — than the publicly listed prices.

While this practice is technically discounting, the reality is that many hospitals publicly list exorbitant chargemaster prices that then get negotiated down by insurers, the federal government or the patients themselves behind closed doors, thus obfuscating what hospital care truly costs and keeping prices high overall.

It's important to note that the price transparency grade does not necessarily mean that a hospital with a B+ grade is cheaper than one graded as a C. Rather, it means the higher-graded hospital provides publicly listed prices that are more accurate, which can better help you financially prepare for your stay.

Vetting the top-scoring hospitals

Numbers and data are the backbone of our analysis, but they don't always tell the whole story.

To ensure the integrity of our ranking, Money reviewed each hospital on our list for any potential red flags that might not be apparent in the statistics.

Through this process, we removed several hospitals where patient care had been compromised, revealing deeper systemic issues. These issues include incidents such as falsified research, inaccurate hospital data, substantiated complaints of sexual harassment, malpractice or unnecessary treatments, all of which undermine patient care.

In the end, 75 hospitals made the cut, each one vetted by Money’s editorial team.

Data sources: Denniston Data; Definitive Healthcare

Supplementary data: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; American College of Surgeons; American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery; Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; RAND Health Care