In May 2025, Money published its inaugural ranking of the best hospitals for orthopedic surgery.

Our methodological approach largely follows our core ranking of the nation’s top general hospitals. However, we included several additional metrics related to orthopedic procedures to better identify the highest-quality facilities for this specialty.

As with all of 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 orthopedic surgery.

Starting with high-quality facilities

To narrow down the thousands of hospitals across the nation, we first started with facilities that have received either a four- or five-star quality rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

The CMS rating (included on the list of hospitals as “quality 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. As with the quality rating, each hospital had to have a patient rating of at least three stars.

CMS ratings make up 20% of a hospital’s overall score.

Highlighting orthopedic 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 orthopedic experience, and considered for this list, hospitals must have active orthopedic specialists on staff who are frequently performing orthopedic 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%.

Hospitals were also favored if the top-rated doctors at the facility practiced orthopedics and if the most common procedure at the hospital was an orthopedic one. In addition to each facility’s sheer volume of staff and procedure counts, Money also factored in readmission and surgical complication rates for hip and knee procedures. Altogether, these metrics make up the “orthopedic specialty” component, which accounted for 35% of the overall score.

The second-largest component of the ranking, at 30%, were orthopedic certifications from The Joint Commission. Money considered whether each facility earned a certification for common orthopedic procedures, including hip, knee and shoulder replacement as well as spinal fusion surgery.

Finally, a hospital had to have demonstrated a dedication to quality care, as determined by participation in clinical trials and overall low rates of readmission and hospital-acquired conditions (weighted at 15%).

Measuring price transparency

Money supplemented the core metrics in our orthopedic ranking with our proprietary “Price Transparency” grade. While this grade is not a weighted factor in our rankings, it provides an indication of how closely the facility's final bill might align with its initial cost estimate.

This long-standing measure in our methodology was updated in 2025 to also account for the level of charity care (free care) provided to low-income patients.

To assess transparency, we analyzed how well hospitals’ chargemaster rates match the actual revenue 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 come up with an answer:

• One compared chargemaster prices to total patient payments (insured and uninsured).
• The other compared gross charges to Medicare-approved reimbursements.

Both were scaled to 100 points and converted to letter grades. Before calculating, we subtracted the value of charity care from each hospital’s gross charges, ensuring that providers offering more free care weren’t penalized for lower revenues.

Even with this adjustment, most patients still pay far less than the listed prices—sometimes significantly less. These differences aren’t discounts, but rather the result of negotiated rates, which contribute to opaque pricing and high healthcare costs.

It’s important to note that the transparency grade doesn’t measure affordability. A hospital with a B+ isn’t necessarily cheaper than one rated C; the score simply indicates how closely its 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 are central to our hospital rankings, they don’t always tell the whole story about a facility. To catch issues that might not appear in the numbers, Money conducted an editorial review of each hospital under consideration, looking for potential red flags.

This process led us to exclude several facilities due to past incidents that raised concerns about care quality or patient safety — including falsified research, inaccurate data reporting, malpractice, unnecessary procedures, and sexual misconduct, all of which may signal deeper systemic issues.

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

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