At minimum the Hospital General Information CSV, plus HCAHPS, Mortality and Readmission, Patient Safety, and Timely and Effective Care. SleekRank joins on the six-digit CCN. You can start with General Information and HCAHPS, then layer additional CSVs as you build out the per-CCN page sections.

Roughly quarterly, with the overall star rating updated twice a year and individual measures on their own cycles. Setting cache_duration to 86400 seconds gives daily re-fetch, which captures any out-of-cycle corrections without waiting for the next major refresh from CMS.

{ccn}-{hospital-name-slug} is the most readable. The CCN guarantees stability across rebrands; the hospital-name suffix makes the URL meaningful in SERP. For chains like HCA or Tenet, include the city in the name slug so two hospitals from the same system never collide on URL pattern.

Critical access hospitals have CCNs starting with 13 and live in the Hospital General Information CSV alongside acute care hospitals. They report a subset of measures since patient volume is lower, so the template should suppress missing measures rather than rendering empty rows in the clinical table for those entries.

Yes. The Complications and Deaths CSV publishes MORT_30 measures for AMI, heart failure, pneumonia, COPD, stroke, and CABG. Map each as a selector with the comparison-to-national column controlling color: green for better-than, neutral for no-different-than, red for worse-than. Render in a measure table grouped by clinical area.

CMS Hospital Compare excludes VA and DOD facilities since they fall outside Medicare certification. If you need to cover them, the VA publishes its own SAIL quality data and Hospital Star Rating system in separate datasets. Run a parallel SleekRank page group keyed by VA station number for those facilities.

Only for rows with a numeric overall star rating and a non-zero HCAHPS completed-surveys count. Use a Twig conditional in the JSON-LD block to emit the schema only when both fields are present, otherwise the page renders without the rich result rather than with broken schema that Google flags.

CMS does not publish the parent system in Hospital Compare, but the AHA Annual Survey and the Definitive Healthcare exports do. Layer a secondary CSV keyed by CCN with a system_id field, and use a selector mapping to render a parent-system link to a separate page group keyed by health system identifier.