Money introduced its first ranking of the best hospitals for neurology in June 2025.

Our methodological approach largely follows our core ranking of the nation’s top general hospitals. Yet this analysis was also tailored to highlight experienced neurologists, neurosurgeons and other specialists working at safe, high-quality hospitals.

We used three core components to measure this: a neurological specialty category (weighted at 45%), a hospital-wide safety and quality category (25%), and federal CMS ratings (20%).

As with all our hospital rankings, Money included its own price transparency analysis, which is an unweighted grading of each hospital’s billing and pricing practices.

Our data partners for this ranking were Denniston Data and Definitive Healthcare.

Here’s a closer look at how we chose the top 75 hospitals for neurology.

Starting with high-quality facilities

We established several filters to ensure that candidate hospitals met certain quality benchmarks.

Chief among them was the requirement to have at least a three-star rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for quality and patient experience.

The CMS ratings (included on the list of hospitals as “quality rating” and “patient rating”) was based on five key factors, which were weighted as follows:

• Mortality (22%): measures 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 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

In our health care system, the patient’s experience plays a crucial role. That’s why we pulled out the patient experience rating as a standalone factor — and used it as a filter.

These ratings were also scored in our analysis, with a 30% weighting.

We used two other key filters to establish our shortlist. We evaluated claims data compiled by Definitive Healthcare for neurological procedures and compared them to the total number of procedures performed at the hospital in 2023. To be considered, at least 2% of all procedures performed at the hospital must have been related to neurology.

The final requirement was that each hospital must have five or more A-rated neurologists or neurosurgeons on their team. (More on how this grade is calculated below.)

This yielded a shortlist of 1,015 hospitals.

Highlighting neurological expertise

Next, we leveraged a novel way that Denniston Data, our data partner, measures quality care: by identifying high-performing doctors and other providers based on their level of experience with certain procedures.

Each hospital earns a Composite Ranking Score (CRS) based on the collective expertise of their doctors and specialists. To be measured by neurological experience, and considered for this list, hospitals must have active neurologists or related specialists on staff who are frequently performing neurological procedures.

The CRS is a percentile that gets translated into a letter grade. The letter grading system is based on this percentage 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%.

We favored hospitals whose largest team of specialists on staff were neurologists, and if their most-commonly performed procedures were related to neurology. In addition to each facility’s volume of staff and number of procedures, Money considered whether the hospital had a dedicated neuro-intensive care unit. These factors collectively made up our “neurological specialty” component, which was weighted at 45% of the overall score.

Lastly, the remaining 25% of the score considered hospital-wide quality and clinical metrics, including whether the facility was receiving any penalties from CMS for readmissions or hospital-acquired conditions. We also looked at whether the hospital is involved in clinical trials, and if so, how many.

Measuring price transparency

Money's proprietary "Price Transparency" grade is included on the list of winners as a supplement to our scored metrics. Though not a weighted factor, it indicates how closely a facility's final bill aligns with its initial cost estimate.

Updated in 2025, this established measure now also accounts for the charity care (free care) provided to low-income patients.

Transparency is assessed by analyzing how closely hospitals’ chargemaster rates align with revenue actually collected from Medicare, insurers and patients. In simple terms: How does a hospital’s sticker price compare to what’s actually paid?

We used two standardized ratios to answer this: One compared chargemaster prices to total patient payments (insured and uninsured), and the other compared gross charges to Medicare-approved reimbursements.

Both were scaled to 100 points and converted into letter grades. Prior to calculation, the value of charity care was subtracted from each hospital’s gross charges, ensuring providers offering more free care were not penalized for a mismatch between charges and revenues.

Even after this adjustment, we find that most patients pay significantly less than the initially listed prices. These differences are not discounts. They’re a result of negotiated rates from Medicare, insurance companies and (sometimes) patients. Inflated list prices contribute to opaque pricing and high health care costs overall.

Remember, the transparency rating does not measure affordability. A hospital graded B+ is not necessarily cheaper than a C-rated one. The score solely indicates how closely listed prices reflect real-world payments.

Though it does not affect a hospital’s score or rank, the grade is intended to help patients better understand how reliable a hospital’s price estimates are likely to be.

Vetting top-scoring hospitals

While data and metrics form the foundation of our hospital rankings, they don't always tell the whole story. To identify potential red flags missed by the numbers, Money conducted an editorial review of each facility under consideration.

This process led to the exclusion of several facilities due to past incidents raising significant concerns about patient safety or care quality. Such issues included falsified research, inaccurate data reporting, widespread malpractice, unnecessary procedures and sexual misconduct – problems that often signal deeper systemic issues.

Ultimately, 75 hospitals met our editorial standards and earned a place on our list of the best hospitals for neurological care.

Data sources: Denniston Data Inc; Definitive Healthcare
Supplementary data: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; American Nurses Credentialing Center; Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; Emergency Nurses Association; RAND Health Care; The Joint Commission