Surgery Center Benchmarks Methodology
Everything here is federal data, reproduced as published. Nothing is scored, weighted or ranked by us, and no facility has paid for placement or can.
Sources
- CMS Provider of Services file (iQIES), 2026 Q2
- The facility universe — 6,640 Medicare-certified ambulatory surgical centers currently in good standing, with addresses, the case types each center filed, operating and procedure room counts, and ownership control type. Centers with a program termination code are excluded.
- CMS ASCQR facility-level quality measures
- Safety and process measures, plus the risk-standardized 7-day hospital visit measures with their case counts, confidence intervals and CMS performance categories. Reporting year 2024.
- CMS OAS CAHPS patient survey
- Patient experience, as linear mean scores. Survey period runs October 2024 to September 2025 — a different vintage from the quality measures, which is why each number carries its own period.
How the numbers are handled
- A dash is not a bad score. CMS suppresses rates below a case threshold. Where that happens the site says so rather than showing a zero or an empty cell that reads as failure.
- Confidence intervals are drawn, not hidden. These are risk-standardized rates on small case counts. Where a center's interval overlaps the national rate it is not meaningfully different, and the chart shows that overlap.
- CMS wording is used verbatim. "No Different Than the National Rate" stays as written; translating it into a letter grade would be our editorial opinion dressed as federal data.
- Metros are CBSA-based, so looking up one city includes the suburbs where centers are actually addressed — which matters more here than in most directories, because surgery centers cluster in affluent suburbs rather than principal cities. Metro names are the U.S. Census Bureau's own titles, from its List 1, 2023. Where CMS files a Metropolitan Division — Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles — that division is used, because a surgeon choosing a site cares about Dallas-Plano-Irving, not all of Dallas-Fort Worth.
- Coverage is national and complete. All 6,640 certified centers, 403 metro areas, 54 states and territories. 571 centers sit outside any metro area — CMS files them with a rural area code, or with no CBSA at all — and they appear on their state's page rather than being dropped for not fitting the metro model.
What's deliberately missing
Per-procedure Medicare payment rates. The ASC fee schedule is keyed to CPT codes, which are copyrighted by the American Medical Association and licensed per user. We have not bought that license, so no procedure codes or code-level rates appear anywhere on this site. Case types shown here come from the CMS facility filing instead, which carries no such restriction.
Physician ownership. The CMS file records only whether a center is for-profit, non-profit or government. It does not identify owners or physician equity, and we will not infer one from the other.
Ratings and rankings. There are none. External ratings from other organizations may be added later, attributed to their source, never blended into a score of ours.
About this build
Demo build. The name is a working placeholder pending trademark and domain clearance. Three metros are built out; the underlying dataset covers all 6,640 centers nationally. The sign-up prompt stores an email in your own browser and sends it nowhere — there is no backend yet.