Birth Injury Marketing
Data · finding

CMS published no obstetric outcome scores for 2024

By Kevin Schwaner, Founder; Chief Marketing OfficerUpdated

For the 2024 reporting period, CMS Care Compare publishes zero hospital-level scores for PC-02 (Cesarean Birth), PC-07a and PC-07b (Risk Adjusted Severe Obstetric Complications) — across all 4,426 reporting hospitals. Every value is withheld under footnote 4, data suppressed by CMS for one or more quarters, or footnote 5, results are not available for this reporting period. Only SM-7, a structural measure rather than an outcome measure, carries published values, for 3,687 of 4,658 hospitals.

What the file actually contains

The CMS Care Compare Maternal Health hospital dataset covers 4,658 facilities and four measures for the 2024 reporting period. Three of those measures are outcome measures. None of the three has a single published score.

Every obstetric measure in the CMS maternal health file, 2024 reporting period. Counts are from the published file, retrieved 2026-08-24.
MeasureHospitals reportingScores publishedRateWithholding codes
PC-02 Cesarean Birth4,42600.0%2,814 × 4, 1,612 × 5
PC-07a Risk Adjusted Severe Obstetric Complications (All)4,42600.0%2,386 × 4, 2,040 × 5
PC-07b Risk Adjusted Severe Obstetric Complications (excl. transfusion-only)4,42600.0%2,386 × 4, 2,040 × 5
SM-7 Maternal Morbidity Structural Measure4,6583,68779.2%799 × 5, 172 × 19
Published versus withheld by measure. Three outcome measures with no published scores, and one structural measure with most scores published. published withheld or not availablePC-02Cesarean Birth4,426PC-07aRisk Adjusted Severe ObstetricComplications4,426PC-07bRisk Adjusted Severe ObstetricComplications4,426SM-7Maternal Morbidity StructuralMeasure3,687971
Figure 1 — the sliver on the first three rows is arithmetically zero. It is drawn only so the bar has a visible boundary. Full audit with the footnote crosswalk. Source: CMS Care Compare, Maternal Health · Hospital, reporting period 1 Jan – 31 Dec 2024.

What the footnotes mean, verbatim

Straight from the CMS footnote crosswalk. Neither of the two codes in play means the value was low.
CodeCMS definitionOccurrences across the three outcome measures
4Data suppressed by CMS for one or more quarters.7,586
5Results are not available for this reporting period.5,692

Why this matters beyond the file

A national hospital-level obstetric complication map is one of the most citable data assets in maternal health. It would be linked by trade press, referenced by advocacy organisations, and used commercially. It is also, for the 2024 period, unbuildable from CMS data.

That creates an obvious temptation. Colour each hospital by whatever partial component is available, fill the rest from a state average or a neighbouring facility, and publish. The result looks finished, almost nobody checks, and the few who do have to download and parse 17,936 rows to prove otherwise.

Four ways to handle a fully suppressed measure. Three produce a plausible false map; only hatching produces a true one. Every cell in the measure is suppressed Colour zeropublishes a false best case State averageinvents a facility value Infer from neighboursassumes the thing measured Hatchsays: not published The first three are indistinguishable from a real mapto any reader who does not open the file Which is exactly why the empty panel is the finding
Figure 2 — the useful output here is not a map, it is a warning. If you are shown a 2024 hospital obstetric outcome map built on CMS data, you now know something about how it was made.

How to verify this in five minutes

  1. Open the CMS Care Compare Maternal Health hospital dataset.
  2. Filter to measure_id of PC_02, PC_07a or PC_07b.
  3. Look at the score column. Every row reads "Not Available".
  4. Check the footnote column against the footnote crosswalk.

If CMS republishes these measures in a later period, this article gets a dated update and the change is noted in the corrections log. Every figure here carries the retrieval date for that reason.

What can be said instead

SM-7, the Maternal Morbidity Structural Measure, does carry data: 3,687 of 4,658 hospitals. It records whether a hospital attests to participating in a perinatal quality improvement collaborative and implementing recommended safety practices. It is a measure of reported structure, not of results, and it should never be described as an outcome. We use it only to identify which hospitals provide inpatient labour and delivery — 2,357 confirmed, 971 not reported.

A limit we will not cross. Nothing on this page links a clinical outcome rate to a legal claim. Adverse-event rates measure medicine. Litigation measures a legal process. They are different quantities, they are collected by different agencies for different reasons, and correlating them would be the fastest way to publish something false. Where we present clinical data and legal data together, it is to describe a market — never to imply that one causes, predicts, or justifies the other.

Sources

  1. CMS Care Compare — Maternal Health · Hospital — PC-02, PC-07a, PC-07b, SM-7; 2024 reporting period
  2. CMS Care Compare — Footnote Crosswalk — definitions for suppression codes
  3. CMS Care Compare — Hospital General Information — ownership, facility type, Birthing Friendly designation

Cite this analysis

Free to reproduce with attribution, including commercially. Charts may be embedded as published.

Birth Injury Marketing. “CMS published no obstetric outcome scores for 2024.” 24 August 2026. https://birthinjurymarketing.com/insights/cms-published-no-obstetric-outcome-scores-in-2024/

Journalists and researchers: the underlying data is already published as CSV at /data/, free and without conditions — no form. Need a different cut, by state, county, hospital or year? Ask, and we will also tell you what the data cannot support.

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Authorship & review

Author
Kevin Schwaner, Founder; Chief Marketing Officer. Credentials.
Last reviewed
Corrections
Found an error? Tell us and it goes in the dated corrections log, whether or not it flatters us.