St. Mary's Health Care System is ranked as the only 4-star hospital in the Athens area and one of only 15 in Georgia under a new rating system unveiled recently by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

"We are proud that St. Mary's has achieved one of the highest ratings in the state," said St. Mary's President and CEO Don McKenna. "Our 4-star rating reflects the exceptional performance of our colleagues and medical staff to providing safe, compassionate, high-quality care to our patients and our community."

The ratings system, known as Hospital Compare, is a new service that CMS designed to help patients choose where to receive non-emergency care. Ratings and detailed analysis can be found at the Hospital Compare website, www.Medicare.gov/hospitalcompare.

To come up with the ratings, CMS compares data from more than 4,000 hospitals across the nation. Each hospital is assessed for how well it performs on 64 measures of quality and safety. Measures range from patients' perceptions of care – such as how well doctors communicate – to emergency care, surgical safety, and readmission rates.

Based on this analysis, CMS awards hospitals a rating of 1 to 5 stars, with 1 star being worst and 5 stars being best. "The overall rating shows how well each hospital performed, on average, compared to other hospitals in the U.S.," CMS says on the Hospital Compare website.

St. Mary's 4-star rating follows a number of other recent recognitions, including being ranked by Healthgrades as one of America's 100 Best Hospitals in 2016, continuous achievement of the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association Gold Plus Award for stroke care seven years in a row, and being named 2015 Georgia Large Hospital of the Year by the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals.