Where you do inpatient rehab shapes the rest of your recovery — yet most people are sent to whichever facility is nearby or has a bed. This tool rates every U.S. inpatient rehab facility on the quality measures that matter most after SCI, using public federal data, so you can compare them and advocate for the right one. Hover any score to see how it's built, or open a facility for its full profile.
Every facility is scored 0–100 on four areas, then those combine into one overall score. We start from public CMS quality measures. For each measure we convert the facility's result into a national percentile (100 = better than every other facility) and flip it where needed so higher always means better — even for "bad" measures like infections, where a low rate earns a high percentile. Each area is the weighted average of its measures; the overall is the weighted average of the four areas:
The overall then folds in SCI patient volume: the score is 75% CMS quality + 25% SCI volume (volume scored as a national percentile), so facilities that treat more spinal cord injury patients rank higher. SCI experience is exactly what CMS quality measures don't capture. A federally designated SCI Model System gets an automatic +15, and a facility accredited by CARF for a Spinal Cord Specialty Program carries a ✓ badge and a +5 bonus — credit for SCI specialization that the facility-wide CMS measures can't see.
Hover any score on a card to see the exact measures and math behind it, or open a facility for its full profile — every measure, the case-mix it treats, and how each number rolls up. Community outcomes and safety carry the most weight, and Function is weighted lower on purpose: the CMS function measure isn't case-mix adjusted, so centers that take the most severe SCI patients get penalized for exactly the work that makes them specialists. Within Safety, pressure injuries and catheter UTIs are weighted heavily because they're the complications that most often harm people with SCI. The federally designated SCI Model System leaders that CMS can't score are pinned at the top with curated, source-cited profiles rather than an invented number.
Federally designated (NIDILRR) centers of excellence for spinal cord injury care and research. Where one is in the CMS data, it carries a SCI Model System badge below — and you can browse the full directory of all 18 designated centers. Three of the most renowned — listed below — are exempt from the CMS program, so they can't carry a CMS score; we pin curated profiles for them at the top of the results so they're not invisible. Their absence from CMS data is not a quality signal:
Source: CMS Care Compare — Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility Quality Reporting Program (public domain). Data snapshot: —. Scores are computed by SCI.help across four domains — functional recovery (25%), return to community & readmissions (30%), safety/complications (30%), and care process (15%) — using risk-adjusted measures where CMS provides them; the overall then blends that CMS composite (75%) with the facility's SCI patient volume (25%, scored as a national percentile), plus a +15 bonus for federally designated SCI Model Systems and +5 for CARF Spinal Cord accreditation. Coordinates are approximate (city-level). Curated Model System profiles are compiled from public sources and carry no CMS score. This is an aid for comparison and advocacy, not medical advice or a government endorsement.
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