In March 2026, Money updated its ranking of hospitals that provide stellar geriatric care.

Our analysis is designed to highlight facilities that demonstrate exemplary care and earn high patient ratings from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as well as distinctions from The Joint Commission and the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP).

Our core data partners for this project were Denniston Data and Definitive Healthcare. Supplementary data sources are cited below.

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

Setting a strict benchmark

To be in the running for this specialty list, a hospital must provide distinguished quality care overall.

We began by limiting the list to short-term, acute-care hospitals that have received quality and patient ratings of three stars or higher from CMS, based on their track record for all patients, whether for geriatric care or not.

CMS’s quality rating (included on the hospitals ranking as “Quality 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%): reflects the degree to which patients had a positive experience at the facility, based on their self-reported ratings of how well their doctors and nurses communicated with them and other factors, including 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; the proportion of health care staff who are vaccinated for flu and COVID-19, and other time-sensitive metrics

Additionally, we segmented out the patient experience rating (displayed as “Patient Rating” on the listing), requiring each hospital to score at least 3 stars out of the possible 5 here as well.

The hospital must also have a team of high-performing geriatric specialists, including at least one A-rated geriatric physician, as determined by our data partner Denniston’s analysis of billable geriatric procedures to CMS through the Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS).

Rewarding geriatric expertise

The facilities that met our universal benchmarks were further evaluated for their geriatric credentials. We assessed the degree of specialization, quality of care and designations or accolades they had related to the treatment of older patients.

These factors were combined to make up each hospital’s “Geriatric Grade.” This assessment converts a numerical ranking score into a letter score, according to this range:

• A+ is a 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%.

Here’s a closer look at the data behind the grade.

Hospital quality

We determined the baseline quality of a hospital by measuring several metrics from the CMS, which is largely based on data from Medicare, an age-restricted federal insurance plan for older adults. These factors include quality and patient experience scores, readmission penalties, and federal survey responses on how well patients felt their doctor communicated their care to them during their hospital stay.

Aside from CMS patient and experience scores — which were weighted at 35%— we captured the broader quality of care a hospital provides by measuring the collective experience of its physicians and specialists, as scored by Denniston. We also analyzed CMS data on penalties for hospital-acquired conditions, excess readmissions and patient-reported scores for how well doctors and staff communicated with them during their stay. These broader measures were weighted at 15%.

Geriatric focus

To spotlight high-quality care for older patients, we analyzed each hospital's team of geriatric specialists and whether the facility had an accredited geriatric emergency department.

Each hospital had to have at least one A-graded geriatric specialist to be considered. We favored medical centers that had an above-average number of these high-performing providers on staff. In addition, we factored in the average grade of all the geriatric specialists associated with the hospital.

A major indicator of a hospital’s geriatric focus is the existence of a geriatric emergency department — as less than 10% of U.S. hospitals have one. We relied on data from the geriatric emergency accreditation program of the American College of Emergency Physicians to verify whether hospitals offer a dedicated geriatric ward.

ACEP accredits hospitals that employ physicians, nurses and other providers with specialized geriatric education. They also give credit for infrastructure that accommodates older patients, such as non-slip floors, adequate handrails, easy access to canes, wheel chairs, walkers and more.

As noted on the ranking table of the best geriatric hospitals, facilities that meet ACEP’s standards are accredited at three different levels — Level I (Gold), Level II (Silver) and Level III (Bronze). If a hospital does not have a geriatric-accredited emergency department but sufficiently excels in other aspects of our analysis, the department is denoted as “standard” on the table.

Geriatric specialization factors are weighted at 40%.

Other designations and accolades

The remaining 10% of our scoring system rewards hospitals that have additional credentials. These include earned designations, certifications or awards that indicate an overall high quality of care, further geriatric specialization or dedication to medical research.

These distinctions include whether the facility is an academic medical center, has participated in clinical trials or has received either the ANCC Magnet award or the ENA Lantern award.

Measuring price transparency

Money supplemented the weighted factors in our analysis with our proprietary “Price Transparency” grade for each hospital on the geriatric care list. This metric, a longstanding component of our methodology, reflects how closely the final bills for the facility align with its initial estimated charges. In 2025, we updated this analysis to reflect the level of charity care — or free care — that hospitals provide for low-income patients.

Money assessed how well hospitals' publicly posted prices (also known as chargemaster rates) match with the actual revenue collected for care, whether that revenue comes from Medicare, insurance companies or direct patient payments.

Put simply, we aimed to answer: How does a hospital’s sticker price compare to what patients (or Medicare) ultimately pay?

To evaluate this, we used two ratios. One compared the chargemaster rates to the total patient payments from both insured and uninsured individuals. The second looked at the difference between a hospital’s gross charges and the amounts Medicare approved for reimbursement. Both ratios were standardized on a 100-point scale and converted into letter grades using the same grading system described earlier.

To factor in charity care, we deducted the value of that care from each hospital’s gross charges before calculating the ratios. This step ensures that hospitals offering more free care than most aren’t penalized for lower-than-expected revenue in our analysis.

Even after accounting for charity care, most patients end up paying less — sometimes substantially less — than a hospital’s listed prices.

While this gap can be viewed as discounting, it’s more accurate to say that chargemaster prices are often set far above what insurers or patients actually pay. These negotiated adjustments, which occur behind closed doors, contribute to the broader problem of unclear pricing and overall high health care costs.

It’s important to note that the price transparency grade is not a measure of affordability. A hospital with a B+ transparency score isn't necessarily less expensive than one rated C; rather, the higher score simply reflects a facility whose price information more accurately reflects what patients might actually pay.

While the transparency score doesn’t factor into a hospital’s final ranking or grade, we display it to help patients factor in the reliability of the facility’s advance estimates to reflect final bills.

Vetting the top-scoring hospitals

While data and metrics form the foundation of our hospital rankings, they may not always capture the full picture of certain facilities.

To address potential concerns that might not be reflected in the numbers, Money conducted an editorial review of each hospital under consideration, to identify possible red flags.

As a result of this review process, we excluded several hospitals where past incidents raised questions about the quality or safety of care. The issues we found ranged from falsified research and inaccurate reporting to verified cases of malpractice, unnecessary procedures or sexual misconduct — all of which can point to deeper, systemic problems.

In the end, 75 hospitals passed our editorial screening and made it on to our list of the best hospitals for geriatric care.

Data sources: Definitive Healthcare; Denniston Data

Supplementary data: American College of Emergency Physicians; American Nurses Credentialing Center; Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; Emergency Nurses Association; RAND Health Care; The Joint Commission