In April 2025, Money unveiled its first-ever 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 “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%): 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).
These filters yielded a tailored universe of 181 hospitals.
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 overall quality of a hospital based on its federal CMS star ratings for quality and patient experience (weighted at 35%).
We also captured the general quality of care a hospital provides by measuring the collective experience of its physicians and specialists, as scored by Denniston. We weeded out hospitals that were being penalized by Medicare — which overwhelmingly insurers older Americans — for abnormally high readmissions and favored facilities where the majority of patients reported strongly understanding the instructions of their care team at discharge. (Weighted at 15%.)
These factors collectively gauge not only a hospital’s standard of care but how patients felt about the care they received.
Geriatric focus
To determine how focused a hospital is on providing high-quality care to older patients, we analyzed its 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, to determine the baseline quality of expertise regardless of whether a patient is receiving care from one of the facility’s top specialists.
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 in our ranking 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 ranking table.
Geriatric specialization factors are weighted at 35%.
Other designations and accolades
The remaining 15% 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, and holds a hip-fracture certification from The Joint Commission.
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 our 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; Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; RAND Health Care; The Joint Commission
