Health Grades, Inc. provides proprietary objective healthcare provider ratings and advisory services in the United States. Its ratings address hospitals, nursing homes, and home health agencies. The company offers healthcare information, including information relating to quality of service, as well as profile information on physicians that enables clients to measure, assess, enhance, and market healthcare quality. It also provides physician-led quality improvement consulting engagements, and other quality improvement analysis and services for hospitals. In addition, the company offers the Connecting Point program under which a physician, hospital, hospital system, or single specialty provider can sponsor applicable physician profiles. Further, it provides programs that offer business development tools and marketing assistance for hospitals; and offers online healthcare quality information for employers, benefits consulting firms, payers, and other organizations that license its Health Management Suite of products, which include Hospital Quality Guide, Physician Quality Guide, Nursing Home Quality Guide, Home Health Quality Guide, Treatment Cost Calculator, Medication Cost Calculator, health risk assessment, personal health record, and medical library. The company’s programs cover various clinical service lines, such as cardiac, orthopedics, vascular, pulmonary, neurosciences, gastrointestinal, critical care, general surgery, bariatric surgery, prostate surgery, maternity care, and women’s health. Its customers also include insurance companies, advertisers, media, and Web portals. As of December 31, 2008, Health Grades provided ratings or profile information relating to approximately 5,900 hospitals, 750,000 physicians in 125 specialties, and 15,000 nursing homes. The company was formerly known as Healthgrades.com, Inc. and changed its name to Health Grades, Inc. in November 2000. Health Grades was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Golden, Colorado.