Birth Injury Marketing
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Obstetric outcome measures: the 2024 blackout

By Kevin Schwaner, Founder; Chief Marketing OfficerUpdated

This is the page we most expected to be a map and least expected to be a finding. For the 2024 reporting period, CMS Care Compare publishes no hospital-level score at all for Cesarean Birth (PC-02) or for either Severe Obstetric Complications measure (PC-07a, PC-07b) — not a low number of scores, not a partially suppressed map. Zero, across all 4,426 reporting hospitals.

PC-02 Cesarean Birth — scores published
0 of 4,4262024 reporting period
PC-07a Severe obstetric complications — published
0 of 4,426all cases
PC-07b Severe obstetric complications — published
0 of 4,426excluding transfusion-only
SM-7 structural measure — published
3,687 of 4,658not an outcome measure
Published versus withheld, by measure, 2024. Four obstetric measures showing that three have no published scores at all and the fourth is a structural rather than outcome measure. published withheld or not available PC-02 Cesarean Birth 4,426 PC-07a Risk Adjusted Severe Obstetric Complicatio… 4,426 PC-07b Risk Adjusted Severe Obstetric Complicatio… 4,426 SM-7 Maternal Morbidity Structural Measure 3,687971
Figure 1 — three solid bars of nothing. The three outcome measures have no published segment at all; the sliver is arithmetically zero. Only SM-7, which records whether a hospital attests to participating in a perinatal quality collaborative, carries data — and it describes structure, not results. Source: CMS Care Compare, Maternal Health · Hospital, reporting period 1 Jan – 31 Dec 2024. Retrieved 2026-08-24.

The audit, in full

Every obstetric measure in the CMS Care Compare maternal health file, 2024 reporting period. Withholding reasons are given by CMS footnote code, with the crosswalk below.
MeasureHospitals reportingScores publishedPublication rateWithholding reasons
PC-02 Cesarean Birth4,42600.0%2,814 × code 4
1,612 × code 5
PC-07a Risk Adjusted Severe Obstetric Complications (All)4,42600.0%2,386 × code 4
2,040 × code 5
PC-07b Risk Adjusted Severe Obstetric Complications (excl. transfusion-only)4,42600.0%2,386 × code 4
2,040 × code 5
SM-7 Maternal Morbidity Structural Measure4,6583,68779.2%799 × code 5
172 × code 19
The CMS footnote crosswalk for the codes that appear above. Verbatim from the CMS footnote dataset — this is what the suppression actually says.
CodeCMS definition
4Data suppressed by CMS for one or more quarters.
5Results are not available for this reporting period.
19Data are shown only for hospitals that participate in the Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) and Outpatient Quality Reporting (OQR) programs.
1The number of cases/patients is too few to report.

Why we are publishing an empty panel

Because the alternative was to make something up, and it would have worked.

The obvious move here was a national hospital obstetric complication map. It is the most linkable asset in this category and nobody has built it. We could have built something that looked exactly like it: colour every hospital by whatever partial component was available, fill the rest by state average or by the nearest facility, and publish. Almost nobody would have checked, and the few who did would have had to download and parse 17,936 rows to prove it.

Filling a suppressed cell is how you end up publishing that some hospital is among the safest in the country because its data happened to be missing. The value is not low. It is absent, and the two are not the same quantity.

So this page is a finding rather than a map, and it is more useful than the map would have been: if you are shown a national hospital-level obstetric outcome map for 2024 built on CMS data, you now know something about how it was made.

What we could have done, and what we did. Four ways to handle a suppressed value, three of which produce a plausible and false map. A suppressed cell Colour it zero publishes a false best case Use the state average invents a facility-level value Infer from neighbours assumes what is being measured Hatch it says: not published A map that looks finished and is wrong and nobody can tell from looking A map with holes that are true Where every cell is suppressed, the honest map is a finding So we published the finding
Figure 2 — three of the four options produce a publishable map. All three are false. The fourth produces this page. We regard that as the higher-value asset, and it is the standard applied to every dataset on this site. The methodology.

What can be said instead

Where obstetric outcome information does and does not exist, as of this page’s review date.
SourceLevelAvailabilityNote
CMS Care Compare PC-02, PC-07a, PC-07bHospitalWithheld entirely for 2024The subject of this page.
CMS Care Compare SM-7HospitalPublished for 3,687 of 4,658A structural attestation, not an outcome. Used on delivery capacity.
AHRQ HCUP Patient Safety Indicators (obstetric trauma)Hospital / stateLicensed, priced per state-yearNot free. Excluded from this layer and stated.
State health department reporting programmesHospitalVaries by stateDefinitions, vintages and coverage differ; not nationally comparable.
CDC WONDER natalityCountyAvailable with restrictionsDelivery characteristics, not adverse outcomes.

The limit that matters most on this page

Even if these measures were published in full, they would describe medicine. They would not describe litigation, they would not predict claims, and a high complication rate would not mean a hospital had done anything wrong — risk adjustment exists precisely because case mix differs. We would still not join them to legal capacity. That rule does not relax when the data gets better.

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. “Obstetric outcome measures: the 2024 blackout.” 24 August 2026. https://birthinjurymarketing.com/intelligence/outcomes/

Journalists and researchers: we will cut this data to your specification — by state, by county, by hospital, by year — and send the underlying CSV, free and without conditions. Ask for a custom cut. We will also tell you what the data cannot support.

Elsewhere in the intelligence layer

Births & delivery volume

Where babies are actually born — county-complete, no suppression.

Obstetric delivery capacity

Which hospitals deliver, which do not, and the 971 CMS does not say.

Legal market capacity

Offices of Lawyers against births, and what that measure cannot tell you.

Malpractice climate

Incomplete, and the page says why rather than filling the gap.

How this was built, and what we could not get → · Model your own market → · All states →

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.