Syracuse hospital star ratings 2026: Crouse and St. Joseph’s at 2 stars, Upstate and VA at 3

Every rated hospital in Onondaga County holds either 2 or 3 stars in Medicare’s 2026 Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings, according to the Hospital General Information file that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) lists as last modified July 22, 2026. St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center and Crouse Hospital each have 2 stars. Upstate University Hospital and the Syracuse VA Medical Center each have 3. Thirty-six New York hospitals hold 4 or 5 stars, and none is in the county.

Why it matters: the star is the first number a patient sees on Medicare’s Care Compare site, and it stays there until CMS reruns the rating next year. Teaching hospitals and hospitals that treat the poorest patients have argued since the first release in 2016 that the method marks them down partly for the patients they take. A fair reading of the Syracuse hospital ratings needs both halves.

The five Onondaga County hospitals in the CMS file

Bed counts for the three civilian hospitals are from the state Health Department’s certification file, updated September 1, 2026. Hutchings is unrated because CMS scores only hospitals in its Inpatient and Outpatient Quality Reporting programs, the same reason 36 of New York’s 56 unrated hospitals have no star.

What does a hospital star rating measure?

CMS built the rating to “summarize quality measure information published to Care Compare on Medicare.gov in a way that is useful and easy to interpret for patients/caregivers,” per its January 28, 2026 presentation on the 2026 ratings. The 2026 version folds 52 measures into five groups: mortality (8 measures), safety of care (8), readmission (11), patient experience (15) and timely and effective care (10). A hospital needs at least 3 measures in each of at least 3 groups, including mortality or safety, to be rated. CMS rated 3,203 hospitals in 2026, up from 2,891 in 2025, and reruns the rating once a year with data from the previous 12 months.

Why do teaching and safety-net hospitals say the method is tilted?

In an October 4, 2016 viewpoint published by the Association of American Medical Colleges, its then-president Darrell Kirch wrote that in the first release “only one major teaching hospital received five stars and nearly 90 percent rated three stars or below.” He gave two reasons: “the lower the number of measures reported, the more likely the institution was to receive a high rating,” and readmission measures “give substantially lower marks to the hospitals that care for the poorest and most vulnerable in our communities.”

CMS answered the first part. In 2021 it added a peer grouping step “with the goal of making like-to-like comparisons among hospitals,” its 2026 presentation says, so hospitals are compared only with hospitals reporting the same number of measure groups. A May 2024 study in JAMA Network Open, co-written by CMS staff, found the step changed 585 of 3,076 ratings in 2023, 517 of them upward, and said “large urban teaching hospitals, frequently report a greater number of measures, and should therefore be compared within a more directly comparable group.”

All four rated Onondaga County hospitals report at least 3 measures in all five groups, which puts them in the largest peer group: 2,277 hospitals nationally, 71 percent of those rated in 2026.

The second part is still open. The American Hospital Association said in an April 28, 2021 statement: “We remain concerned that CMS’s failure to account for social risk factors in calculating performance on measures like readmissions biases the ratings against those hospitals caring for more vulnerable patients.”

That context sits heaviest on Upstate University Hospital. It is the only academic medical center in Central New York, it says, and the only Level I adult and pediatric trauma center in the state Health Department’s Central New York trauma region, per the department’s trauma list revised July 2026. The state also certifies 6 burn beds and 4 bone marrow transplant beds there. Those units take the sickest patients from a wide area; Upstate says its trauma center serves 1.8 million people and 27 referral hospitals.

What sits behind each Syracuse hospital’s stars?

For the three outcome groups, the CMS file counts how many of each hospital’s measures were better than, no different from, or worse than the national value:

Across the four hospitals, 25 of 27 mortality measures were no different from the national value, one better and one worse. On safety, 7 measures were better than national and 2 worse. Readmission is where the worse marks cluster: 10 of 34 measures, including 4 of St. Joseph’s 9. Readmissions are the measures the AHA flags as most sensitive to patients’ circumstances. The file does not say why any hospital’s readmissions run higher, and CNY Signal is not guessing.

How do New York hospitals compare with the country?

New York skews low. Of the 136 New York hospitals CMS rated, 66 (49 percent) hold 1 or 2 stars and 36 (26 percent) hold 4 or 5. Nationally, 874 of 3,203 rated hospitals (27 percent) hold 1 or 2 stars and 1,338 (42 percent) hold 4 or 5, using the distribution in CMS’s 2026 presentation.

What the star cannot tell you

The AHA wrote in a July 31, 2024 news item that “star ratings reflect only available measures, and as a result, the relevance of the rating to a particular patient’s care needs could vary.” A star rating is not a verdict on any individual doctor, department or patient outcome, and CNY Signal is not telling anyone where to seek or avoid care. CMS recalculates the rating every year.

CNY Signal pulled the Onondaga County and New York rows from CMS’s Hospital General Information dataset through the agency’s API on September 13, 2026 and computed the shares from CMS’s counts.