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Health Systems Serving Sun City Hilton Head

August 25, 2026 · Researched and written with AI, then cross-checked — how Deep Dives are made

Four systems, six hospitals, two states — and what “which system” changes for the person in the waiting room

Facts current as of August 25, 2026. Most sources were retrieved on August 24, 2026; pages re-fetched on August 25, 2026 carry that date where it matters. Quality ratings, construction schedules, and financial filings change; the dataset date or retrieval date is given wherever it matters. This guide reports what each source publishes. It does not rank the systems.

Most residents pick a doctor, not a health system. The system arrives anyway — in the name at the top of the bill, in which hospital your doctor can admit you to, in which website holds your test results, and in where the ambulance takes you when the decision is not yours to make.

Within roughly forty-five minutes of Sun City there are four of them. Two are South Carolina hospital operators; two are in Savannah. Between them they run six acute-care hospitals, two freestanding emergency departments already open in Bluffton, and two more hospitals approved for Bluffton — Beaufort Memorial’s already under construction, Novant’s still in permitting.

This guide profiles each one using the same set of facts, drawn from official records where they exist and clearly labeled where they do not. It ends with a side-by-side table, questions worth asking your own practice, and an honest account of what this research could not pin down.

Why this matters

The admitting hospital. If your primary-care practice is owned by a system that runs more than one hospital, a scheduled admission usually goes to one of them. None of the four systems publishes which one for its clinics near Sun City. That is the largest gap in this research, and the first question in the list at the end.

Where the emergency department is. Two of Bluffton’s emergency rooms are freestanding — a full 24/7 emergency department in its own building, with no inpatient beds upstairs. If you need admission from one, you are transported to the parent hospital. Which hospital that is, and whose license the ED operates under, determines both the transfer and the bill.

The portal. Your records live in whichever electronic system your practice uses. Two of the four describe their portal as MyChart, which their own pages associate with Epic; two use MEDITECH; Beaufort Memorial has two separate logins, one for the hospital and one for its physician practices; and Memorial Health’s site names two portal brands, MyChart and MyHealthONE. None of the four systems’ portal pages retrieved for this guide names another system with which it shares records — so do not assume a Savannah specialist can see your Bluffton imaging.

Facility fees. When a clinic is legally part of a hospital rather than a freestanding doctor’s office — the arrangement Medicare calls provider-based — one visit can produce two charges: the physician’s fee and a hospital “facility fee.” No South Carolina facility-fee notice was located for any of the four systems’ local sites in this research. That is not proof one never applies; it means nothing was published where a resident would look.

Medicare Advantage networks. A Medicare Advantage plan contracts with specific hospitals and specific billing entities. This guide did not research plan networks — they change, and they differ by plan. Check your plan’s own directory, and note the date you checked.

Who is in scope, and why

The rule used here: a system is in scope if it operates an acute-care hospital or hospital-based emergency department within roughly 45 minutes’ drive of Sun City (Okatie, SC 29909), or holds an approved Certificate of Need for one. A Certificate of Need (CON) is the state permission a hospital must obtain before it can build.

Every Medicare-certified hospital in the surrounding South Carolina and Georgia counties was enumerated from CMS’s Hospital General Information dataset and then tested against that rule (CMS Hospital General Information, released August 13, 2026). Four systems qualified: Novant Health, Beaufort Memorial, HCA Healthcare’s Memorial Health, and St. Joseph’s/Candler.

Excluded: Colleton Medical Center (Walterboro) and Hampton Regional Medical Center (Varnville), on road distance — no drive time was computed for either; Naval Hospital Beaufort, which CMS records show with no emergency services; and Effingham, East Georgia Regional, Liberty Regional, Optim Screven, Winn Army, Georgia Regional Savannah and Coastal Harbor, as outside the rule or not general acute-care hospitals (CMS). Tidelands Health operates in the Georgetown and Horry County area (Tidelands).

MUSC Health is present locally but not as a hospital operator: it has an affiliation with Beaufort Memorial (Beaufort Memorial) and opened the MUSC Health Bluffton Medical Pavilion at 700 Buckwalter Towne Blvd in June 2026 — a medical office building with no emergency department or inpatient beds (MUSC Health).

About the drive times. One set was computed by geocoding the Sun City ZIP-code center and each hospital’s published address, then routing between them at free-flow speeds with no traffic, on August 24, 2026, using OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim geocoder and the OSRM routing service (Nominatim). A second set came from city-to-city lookups, which measure between town centers rather than addresses. Where they disagree, both are given. Every drive time here is an estimate, computed without traffic; the US-278 and Bluffton Parkway corridors are seasonally congested, and a real trip in March is not a free-flow trip.

Novant Health

Novant Health, Inc. is headquartered at 2085 Frontis Plaza Blvd, Winston-Salem, North Carolina (Novant), and is a nonprofit — a 501(c)(3) organization, EIN 56-1376950, per IRS filings (ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer). It bought Hilton Head Hospital, Coastal Carolina Hospital and East Cooper Medical Center from Tenet Healthcare in a transaction Novant announced as closed on February 1, 2024, for approximately $2.4 billion (Novant, February 1, 2024; WTOC).

The hospital on Hilton Head bills as Hilton Head Medical Center, LLC, NPI 1902675101, with a Winston-Salem mailing address and additional practice locations in Bluffton (CMS NPPES). The names Hilton Head Medical Center, LLC and South Carolina Coastal Medical Center, LLC, with EINs 93-4604680 and 93-4580630, also appear in the filenames of Novant’s own published standard-charge files (Novant price transparency). Neither state corporate registry was checked.

Hospitals. Novant Health Hilton Head Medical Center, 25 Hospital Center Blvd, Hilton Head Island (Medicare CCN 420080), and Novant Health Coastal Carolina Medical Center, 1000 Medical Center Dr, Hardeeville (CCN 420101), which CMS still lists under its former name, “Coastal Carolina Hospital” (CMS). Novant states Hilton Head has 93 beds (Novant facility information); the hospital’s own location page states no bed count (Novant location page). Coastal Carolina’s count diverges: Novant’s facility page says 44, third-party directories report 37 to 41. No state license was obtained for either, so no bed count in this guide is license-verified. Coastal Carolina is the closest hospital to Sun City — about 10 to 20 minutes, by estimates that range from 9 minutes free-flow to 15–20 minutes city-to-city; Hilton Head Medical Center is roughly 20 to 40 minutes.

Emergency departments. Both hospitals have one. Novant also runs two freestanding emergency departments in Bluffton. The Tidewatch Emergency Department, 349 Tidewatch Dr W, appears on Novant’s own location pages (Novant), which do not state which hospital’s license it operates under; Novant’s February 2024 acquisition release lists a “Tidewatch Free-Standing Emergency Department” in Bluffton among the assets it bought from Tenet (Novant, February 1, 2024). The Bluffton Emergency Department at 8 Parkside Dr opened July 21, 2026 — Novant’s own announcement says it is open and seeing patients, 24 hours a day, with advanced diagnostics; one research reading of that announcement reported that it operates under Hilton Head Medical Center’s license, but that statement was not found on the page when rechecked and is treated here as not verified (Novant, July 21, 2026; WTOC; Post and Courier). Novant’s opening announcement describes a 10,000-square-foot facility with ten treatment rooms, including a trauma room (Novant, July 21, 2026); press accounts give the same dimensions and add a 40,000-square-foot medical office building beside it (Post and Courier). Neither freestanding ED’s drive time was computed with a routing tool.

Nearby and planned. Novant Health Okatie Primary Care sits at 40 Okatie Center Blvd South, Suite 100, Okatie 29909, with primary care on Arley Way, general surgery at Belfair, Okatie Surgical Partners and infectious-disease care in Bluffton (Novant clinic pages); no existing Novant urgent-care site near Sun City was verified. Novant Health Bluffton Medical Center — 50 beds, expandable to 100, roughly $320 million — received its Certificate of Need on March 24, 2025, with anticipated opening in 2028 (Novant; Post and Courier). Novant places it on a campus it calls Washington Square Medical Park, less than half a mile from the Parkside Drive ED (Novant). South Carolina’s Department of Public Health published a Certificate of Need public-hearing notice for the project — hearing set for January 14, 2025 — describing a 50-bed hospital of 196,500 square feet at a project cost of $320,049,946.79, with 33 beds transferred from existing capacity and 17 new beds (SC DPH Certificate of Need public hearing notice). Which existing hospital the 33 transferred beds come from is not stated in that notice. The signed state CON decision document was not retrieved.

What membership means. The portal is MyNovant, which Novant’s portal page describes as Epic MyChart (MyNovant); whether both South Carolina hospitals are fully on it was not separately verified. Novant’s financial-assistance page distinguishes provider-based clinics from non-provider-based ones in North Carolina, (Novant), and its price page says posted charges are hospital charges only and exclude physician fees (Novant) — but no South Carolina facility-fee notice was located. Novant publishes a separate South Carolina financial-assistance policy, and it was read for this guide: it provides free emergency or medically necessary care to eligible patients with annual family income at or below 300% of the current federal poverty guidelines, subject to service-area, insurance-coverage, asset and other conditions, and it excludes elective services and services from independent clinicians not covered by the policy. The document identifies December 2024 as its initial effective date, states that the electronic version is the current approved version, and lists a next review date of December 2027 (policy PDF). That South Carolina policy is a separate document from the widely reported expansion of free care to 300% of the federal poverty level, effective January 2025, which applies to North Carolina facilities per Novant’s own release (Novant, December 2024). Machine-readable price files are posted for both South Carolina hospitals; that page carried an April 24, 2026 date (Novant).

Organization facts. Novant’s most recently extracted Form 990, for fiscal year 2024 as displayed by ProPublica on recheck, reports $6.54 billion in total revenue, $6.19 billion in expenses, $14.56 billion in total assets and $863.3 million in net assets, with reported compensation of $6,943,831 plus $1,207,106 in other compensation for chief executive Carl Armato (ProPublica). The prior-year (tax year 2023) extract read earlier in this research showed $4.02 billion in revenue and $3.72 billion in net assets; the year-over-year change in the consolidation basis was not examined, and the return covers a single legal entity that may not represent the consolidated system. Novant separately reports $2.1 billion in community benefit for 2025 across 21 medical centers, 730-plus clinics and 43,000-plus team members as of December 31, 2025 (Novant), and its facility-information page lists the medical centers individually, including the three South Carolina hospitals (Novant). A search of HHS Office for Civil Rights enforcement listings returned no Novant matter (HHS OCR); no official enforcement record was located in this research, which is not the same as a clean record.

Beaufort Memorial

The legal name is Beaufort County Memorial Hospital; it operates as Beaufort Memorial, at 955 Ribaut Rd, Beaufort (CCN 420067) (CMS). It is the one system here that is neither a private nonprofit nor a public company, and four facts have to travel together: CMS classifies it as Government – Local (CMS); its trustees are appointed by Beaufort County Council, whose own website calls the hospital board “an agency of Council” (Beaufort County); it describes itself as not-for-profit and dates itself to 1944 (Beaufort Memorial); and it files no Form 990, as a governmental entity is not required to (ProPublica). Any single label is incomplete.

Hospital. One hospital, licensed for 201 beds — 169 acute, 14 rehabilitation, 18 mental health — as stated by Beaufort Memorial (Beaufort Memorial). Estimated drive time from Sun City is roughly 30 to 45 minutes; the free-flow route is 33 minutes and 24 miles.

Emergency care. The hospital emergency department in Beaufort today. Under construction: Beaufort Memorial Emergency & Urgent Care, 1016 William Hilton Pkwy on Hilton Head Island, roughly 11,400 square feet, developed with Intuitive Health and MUSC Health (Beaufort Memorial; WSAV). The entity was enumerated in the federal provider registry at that address on July 29, 2026 (CMS NPPES). Completion dates diverge: Beaufort Memorial says fall 2026 (Beaufort Memorial), the Post and Courier reported early 2027 (Post and Courier).

Nearby. The Okatie Medical Pavilion, 122 Okatie Center Blvd North, Okatie 29909 — primary care, specialties, imaging, laboratory, and an Express Care urgent-care suite — is inside Sun City’s own ZIP code (Beaufort Memorial), and the federal registry lists organization NPIs at that address (NPPES). System-wide, Beaufort Memorial reports 32 practices, two cancer centers and three Express Care locations (Beaufort Memorial).

Planned. Bluffton Community Hospital — 28 inpatient beds, roughly $103 million, CON approved March 24, 2025, with a full-service emergency department, imaging, a four-suite outpatient surgery center, endoscopy and laboratory (Beaufort Memorial). Beaufort Memorial places it at 10 Innovation Dr and reports the building topped off on December 4, 2025, with completion late in 2026 and first patients early in 2027 (Foundation updates; topping-off announcement). A Bluffton hospital has been contested ground: an earlier 2018 application, for a 20-bed hospital, was withdrawn on September 10, 2024, and the contested case then dismissed, ending a legal fight of more than six years with the then-Tenet-owned Hilton Head and Hardeeville hospitals and Candler Hospital (Post and Courier). Beaufort Memorial and MUSC had announced a Bluffton “micro hospital” joint venture in January 2018 (Beaufort Memorial); whether that structure governs the current project is not established.

What membership means. Beaufort Memorial operates a single hospital, but the admitting arrangement for its clinics is not published. Two portals: the hospital portal runs on MEDITECH (account request page), while the physician practices use athenahealth, where the system notes that some messaging carries a fee (patient portals). No facility-fee notice was located on the billing pages, which do name several groups that bill separately — imaging, pathology and anesthesia (billing and insurance). Financial assistance offers up to a 100% discount on medically necessary care for patients meeting income criteria, elective services excluded; the plain-language summary dated May 2026 sets the income limit at less than 300% of the current-year federal poverty guidelines, with additional asset and insurance conditions (financial assistance). A 2026 machine-readable charge file is posted (billing and insurance).

Organization facts. As a governmental entity it files no Form 990, so no revenue, net-asset, community-benefit or executive-compensation figure is published through that route; audited financial statements exist but were not reviewed here (ProPublica). Its president and chief executive is E. Russell Baxley III (Beaufort Memorial). No official enforcement record was located in this research.

HCA Healthcare — Memorial Health

HCA Healthcare, Inc., One Park Plaza, Nashville, Tennessee, is a for-profit company traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker HCA (Form 10-K for FY2025, filed February 10, 2026). Note that CMS’s ownership field for the Savannah hospital still reads “Voluntary non-profit,” a stale entry that does not reflect the 2018 sale; the SEC filing is the current record.

Hospital. Memorial Health University Medical Center, 4700 Waters Ave, Savannah (CCN 110036), enrolled with Medicare under the legal name Savannah Health Services, LLC (CMS). The hospital describes itself as an American College of Surgeons–verified Level I trauma center (Memorial Health; About Us) — the only Level I trauma center among the hospitals in this comparison, according to the hospitals’ own pages. Licensed beds could not be verified: published figures range from 512 to 711, none from a primary record. Estimated drive time is about 40 to 50 minutes; the free-flow route is 42 minutes and 26.5 miles.

How it got here. Memorial Health, then a nonprofit, was sold to HCA in a transaction that closed February 1, 2018, reported by local press at about $710 million including debt retirement and a ten-year capital commitment (WTOC; HCA South Atlantic Division). The price is a press figure, not a filed one.

Nearby, and no longer nearby. Memorial Health’s Bluffton/Okatie adult primary-care practice closed at the end of December 2025, per WTOC quoting Memorial Health (WTOC, December 22, 2025). No current Memorial Health clinic near Sun City was verified. The system publishes a 24/7 Consult-A-Nurse line, (844) 706-8773 (Memorial Health). Planned: freestanding emergency rooms in Pooler and Richmond Hill, Georgia, announced September 3, 2025, after the Georgia Supreme Court declined an appeal of the state’s approval; no opening dates or addresses were published (Memorial Health; WTOC). Both are Georgia sites; no South Carolina Certificate of Need for HCA was located.

What membership means. Memorial Health’s site publishes two portal names, and the pages retrieved do not say which one holds the records of a given practice. Its homepage and its “Epic and MyChart” page name MyChart, with the login at mychart.hca-south.com (Memorial Health, re-fetched August 25, 2026). The hospital’s own About Us page separately promotes MyHealthONE, which it describes as letting patients view health records — lab results, physician notes, imaging reports — and “share your health records with a physician or caregiver” (Memorial Health, re-fetched August 25, 2026). The MyChart page, titled “Epic and MyChart,” describes Epic as the electronic medical record system behind that portal and says the record “can be shared by participating doctors, hospitals, and patients,” naming none; the About Us page does not say what records system sits behind MyHealthONE. Financial assistance for non-elective care runs in bands: household income at 0–200% of the federal poverty level qualifies for a 100% charity discount, and 201–400% for expanded assistance on balances above $1,500, with criteria that may vary by location and a separate uninsured discount (financial assistance). A machine-readable charge file is posted (pricing transparency). No facility-fee notice was located.

Organization facts. HCA reported total revenues of $75.600 billion and net income attributable to HCA of $6.784 billion for FY2025, operating 190 hospitals across 19 states and England (Form 10-K; HCA fourth-quarter 2025 results). Chief executive Samuel N. Hazen’s total 2025 compensation was $26,456,606 (proxy statement, filed March 13, 2026). Community benefit is not published — for-profit filers do not report it — and no Savannah-specific figures are separable from the corporate totals.

Official records involving these names. Three matters appear in official records, and the entity each one names matters.

Both OIG pages were re-fetched on the live oig.hhs.gov site on August 25, 2026 and support the dates, amounts and entity names above. Both matters predate HCA’s February 2018 acquisition and name the predecessor nonprofit entities, not Savannah Health Services, LLC, the entity that bills today. No official action specific to Savannah Health Services, LLC was located in this research — which is not a finding that none exists.

St. Joseph’s/Candler

St. Joseph’s/Candler Health System, Inc., 5353 Reynolds St, Savannah, Georgia, is a nonprofit, EIN 58-2288758 (ProPublica; About Us). Georgia’s business registry lists St. Joseph’s/Candler Health System, Inc. as an active domestic nonprofit corporation with a principal address of 5353 Reynolds Street, Savannah (Georgia Secretary of State business record). The system describes itself as faith-based and not-for-profit, serving 33 counties, and says its two hospitals have “a combined history of more than 350 years”; the individual founding years and the year the system formed, reported in the research from the same page, were not on the page when rechecked and are not stated here. Structurally it is two hospital corporations under a parent: Candler Hospital, Incorporated (EIN 58-0593388) and Saint Josephs Hospital, Inc. (EIN 58-0568702) (ProPublica; ProPublica).

Hospitals. Candler Hospital, 5353 Reynolds St, Savannah (CCN 110024), and St. Joseph’s Hospital, 11705 Mercy Blvd, Savannah (CCN 110043), both with emergency departments (CMS). The system publishes only a combined figure of 714 beds across the two (About Us); third-party directories put Candler at about 384, which would leave about 330 for St. Joseph’s. Neither per-hospital number comes from a state license. Candler is about 40 to 50 minutes away (42 minutes free-flow); St. Joseph’s is about 50 minutes free-flow, outside the 45-minute scope rule on its own, and included here because it shares a system with Candler. No freestanding emergency department, South Carolina hospital, or planned facility was located for this system.

Nearby. St. Joseph’s/Candler Primary Care – Bluffton, 10 Oak Forest Rd Suite C, (843) 815-3006 — at one retrieval on August 24, 2026 the page stated that none of its providers were accepting new patients; a later recheck the same day found no such statement, so treat that status as volatile and unverified — and the SJ/C Bluffton Campus at 100 Buckwalter Place Blvd, (843) 836-7100 (St. Joseph’s/Candler). Which legal entity bills for those South Carolina clinics was not established.

What membership means. The patient portal, formerly branded iConnect, runs on MEDITECH with an mHealth app (patient portal); a November 2023 trade report describes a system-wide MEDITECH Expanse implementation (TechTarget). With two hospitals in one system the admitting question is a live one, and it is not published on the Bluffton clinic pages. Financial assistance is described as reduced fees based on income and household size, with payment plans; the page states no income thresholds (financial assistance). Machine-readable charge files for both hospitals are posted, effective July 1, 2025 (standard charges). No facility-fee notice was located.

Organization facts. The parent corporation’s Form 990 shows essentially no operating revenue — it is a holding entity, and the money is in the hospital returns. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025 — the most recent extract displayed by ProPublica on recheck — Candler Hospital, Inc. reported $594,101,596 in revenue, $547,932,816 in expenses and $407,341,410 in net assets (ProPublica), and Saint Josephs Hospital, Inc. reported $378,594,026 in revenue, $369,686,138 in expenses and $163,072,749 in net assets (ProPublica). The parent’s fiscal 2025 return shows $6,132 in revenue and $659,270,429 in net assets (ProPublica). Paul P. Hinchey, listed as president, is shown on the two hospital returns for fiscal 2025 with $1,072,939 in reportable compensation, $715,292 from related organizations and $31,818 other — about $1.82 million in total, each return reporting the same amounts from the other’s side; whether he remains chief executive in 2026 was not verified. The system publishes a 2025 Community Benefit Report and audited financial statements, not reviewed here (organizational and financial information). No official enforcement record was located in this research.

Official measures, hospital by hospital

Everything in this section comes from four public datasets that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services publishes through Care Compare, fetched directly from CMS’s data API for this guide on August 25, 2026: Hospital General Information (xubh-q36u), Patient Survey (HCAHPS) – Hospital (dgck-syfz), Unplanned Hospital Visits – Hospital (632h-zaca), and Timely and Effective Care – Hospital (yv7e-xc69). All four were released August 13, 2026 and carry a CMS last-modified date of July 22, 2026 (CMS Hospital General Information; CMS Patient Survey (HCAHPS); CMS Unplanned Hospital Visits; CMS Timely and Effective Care).

Each value is reported as published by CMS for the period shown. Nothing here is ranked, scored, averaged or combined, and the six hospitals are not measured on identical sets of patients. Where CMS marks a measure unavailable, this guide writes “not published” and gives CMS’s footnote number — a statement about the record, not about the hospital.

CMS overall star rating and the patient survey

Hospital (system, Medicare CCN) CMS overall star Surveys completed / response rate Survey summary star “Would definitely recommend” Rated the hospital 9 or 10 Nurse communication star Doctor communication star
Novant Health Hilton Head Medical Center (Novant, 420080) 2 524 / 29% 2 55% 56% 2 2
Novant Health Coastal Carolina Medical Center (Novant, 420101) 4 469 / 18% 3 61% 62% 3 3
Beaufort Memorial Hospital (Beaufort Memorial, 420067) 4 825 / 19% 3 62% 61% 3 3
Memorial Health University Medical Center (HCA, 110036) 1 643 / 16% 2 64% 61% 2 2
Candler Hospital (St. Joseph’s/Candler, 110024) 2 1,545 / 19% 3 69% 65% 2 3
St. Joseph’s Hospital – Savannah (St. Joseph’s/Candler, 110043) 2 553 / 24% 3 75% 70% 3 3

Survey results cover October 1, 2024 through September 30, 2025. HCAHPS is CMS’s standardized patient-experience survey, sent to a sample of discharged patients; the star columns are CMS’s own conversions of those survey answers, not this guide’s. The samples are small and the response rates modest — 469 to 1,545 completed surveys per hospital, response rates of 16% to 29% — which is worth remembering before reading much into a few percentage points. CMS’s own caveat applies to the overall star rating: it summarizes a selected set of measures, and hospitals are not measured on identical sets. Source: CMS Hospital General Information and Patient Survey (HCAHPS) – Hospital, released August 13, 2026, last modified July 22, 2026 (CMS; CMS).

30-day readmission, condition by condition

Hospital Heart attack Bypass surgery (CABG) COPD Heart failure Hip/knee replacement Pneumonia
Hilton Head Medical Center 14.9 11.4 20.4 22.9 5.7 19.2
Coastal Carolina Medical Center Not published — number of cases too small (footnote 1) Not published (footnote 5) 19.8 21.1 Not published — number of cases too small (footnote 1) 17.6
Beaufort Memorial Hospital 14.7 Not published (footnote 5) 19.7 21.1 5.2 16.5
Memorial Health University Medical Center 14.8 12.9 18.9 22.2 6.7 19.5
Candler Hospital Not published — number of cases too small (footnote 1) Not published (footnote 5) 20.1 18.9 Not published (footnote 5) 18.5
St. Joseph’s Hospital – Savannah 13.3 10.4 19.9 20.1 6.3 17.0

These are CMS’s risk-adjusted 30-day readmission rates, as percentages, for July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2025. Every rate published above sits in CMS’s comparison category “No Different Than the National Rate” — CMS’s own label, reproduced here without interpretation; the dataset shows no other comparison category for any of these six hospitals on any of these six conditions. The separate hospital-wide hybrid readmission measure, for July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025, is marked “Not Available” with CMS footnote 4 for all six hospitals. Blank cells above are not blanks: each is a measure CMS did not publish for that hospital, with CMS’s footnote number given. Source: CMS Unplanned Hospital Visits – Hospital, released August 13, 2026, last modified July 22, 2026 (CMS).

Emergency department volume, time and sepsis care

Hospital ED volume (2024) Median minutes in the ED before leaving (Oct. 2024–Sep. 2025) Left before being seen (2024) Sepsis care bundle, SEP-1 (Oct. 2024–Sep. 2025)
Hilton Head Medical Center Medium 166 (n=467) 0% (of 22,804) 48% (n=116)
Coastal Carolina Medical Center Medium 130 (n=482) 0% (of 39,228) 67% (n=123)
Beaufort Memorial Hospital High 221 (n=472) 3% (of 45,971) 83% (n=205)
Memorial Health University Medical Center Very high 162 (n=466) 0% (of 130,977) 72% (n=100)
Candler Hospital High 196 (n=364) 6% (of 52,089) 52% (n=408)
St. Joseph’s Hospital – Savannah High 203 (n=369) 6% (of 47,618) 52% (n=459)

The minutes column is CMS measure OP-18b: the median time patients spent in the emergency department before leaving from the visit, excluding patients transferred to another facility and psychiatric or mental-health patients. It is not the wait before a clinician is seen, and a lower number is better in CMS’s description of the measure. “ED volume” is CMS’s own category for the hospital’s annual emergency visits, not a count. “Left before being seen” is the percentage of emergency patients who left without being evaluated, out of the visit count shown. SEP-1 is the percentage of eligible patients who received the complete severe-sepsis and septic-shock care bundle. Every SEP-1 percentage above except Beaufort Memorial’s carries CMS footnote 2; the dataset as supplied does not include text that would let this guide translate that footnote into a more specific explanation, so it is reported as a footnote and nothing more. A hospital-acquired-infection summary was not retrieved for this guide and is therefore not published here. Source: CMS Timely and Effective Care – Hospital, released August 13, 2026, last modified July 22, 2026 (CMS).

Leapfrog safety grades and accreditation

These two rows come from bodies other than CMS, and neither is a CMS measure.

Hospital Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, Spring 2026 Accreditation, as stated by the organization
Hilton Head Medical Center C (Leapfrog) Novant states the hospital is Joint Commission accredited (Novant); not verified with the Joint Commission
Coastal Carolina Medical Center B (Leapfrog) Novant states the hospital is Joint Commission accredited (Novant); not verified with the Joint Commission
Beaufort Memorial Hospital C (Leapfrog) States it is fully Joint Commission accredited (BMH); not verified with the Joint Commission
Memorial Health University Medical Center B (Leapfrog) About Us page states Joint Commission accreditation with stroke and joint-replacement certifications (Memorial); not verified with the Joint Commission
Candler Hospital Grade Not Available — no letter grade published for the cycle (Leapfrog) Awards page states Joint Commission accreditation (SJC); not independently verified
St. Joseph’s Hospital – Savannah Not retrieved — the grade page could not be fetched in this research (Leapfrog ratings site) Awards page states Joint Commission accreditation (SJC); not independently verified

Leapfrog is a private nonprofit that issues letter grades twice a year, in spring and fall cycles, from a voluntary hospital survey plus public data; grades from different cycles are not interchangeable, so a hospital’s spring grade should not be read against another hospital’s fall grade. “Grade Not Available” is not a letter grade and is not a failing grade. Leapfrog’s spring 2026 release states that it assigned no grade to 450 hospitals that did not participate in its 2024 or 2025 survey (Leapfrog). “Not retrieved” in the table above is an access failure in this research, not a result. And accreditation is not independently verified anywhere in this guide: the Joint Commission’s public lookup could not be retrieved, so every accreditation statement here is the organization’s own.

Side by side

This table reports what each source publishes; it does not rank the systems. Scope rule: an acute-care hospital or hospital-based emergency department within roughly 45 minutes’ drive of Sun City (Okatie, SC 29909), or an approved Certificate of Need for one. All values retrieved August 24, 2026 except where a later retrieval date is given in the cell. Drive times are estimates computed without traffic. “Not published” is a statement about the record, not about the hospital.

Field Novant Health Beaufort Memorial HCA / Memorial Health St. Joseph’s/Candler
Headquarters Winston-Salem, NC (src) Beaufort, SC (src) Nashville, TN (src) Savannah, GA — 5353 Reynolds St per the Georgia business registry (GA SOS; src)
Ownership type Nonprofit 501(c)(3), EIN 56-1376950 (IRS via ProPublica) Public — county-chartered: CMS “Government – Local” (CMS), trustees appointed by County Council (county), self-described not-for-profit (BMH), files no Form 990 (ProPublica) For-profit, NYSE: HCA (10-K) Nonprofit 501(c)(3), EIN 58-2288758 (IRS via ProPublica); active domestic nonprofit corporation in Georgia’s business registry (GA SOS)
Local billing entity Hilton Head Medical Center, LLC, NPI 1902675101 (NPPES) Beaufort County Memorial Hospital (ProPublica) Savannah Health Services, LLC (CMS) Two hospital corporations (ProPublica); SC clinic entity not verified
Entered local market Acquired from Tenet, closed February 1, 2024, ~$2.4B (Novant) Founded 1944, per Beaufort Memorial (BMH) Acquired Memorial Health, closed February 1, 2018; ~$710M per press (WTOC) Long-established; “combined history of more than 350 years,” per the system (SJC)
Local hospitals (Medicare CCN) Hilton Head MC (420080); Coastal Carolina MC (420101) (CMS) Beaufort Memorial Hospital (420067) (CMS) Memorial Health UMC (110036) (CMS) Candler (110024); St. Joseph’s (110043) (CMS)
Beds (none license-verified) Hilton Head 93 per Novant (Novant); Coastal Carolina 44 per Novant, 37–41 per directories 201 — 169 acute, 14 rehab, 18 mental health — per BMH (BMH) Not verified; published figures range 512–711 Combined 714 for both (SJC); Candler ~384 per directories, St. Joseph’s ~330 by subtraction
Drive time from Sun City (estimate) Coastal Carolina ~10–20 min (9 min free-flow); Hilton Head ~20–40 min (26 min free-flow) (method) ~30–45 min (33 min free-flow) (method) ~40–50 min (42 min free-flow) (method) Candler ~40–50 min (42 min free-flow); St. Joseph’s ~50 min free-flow (method)
Emergency departments Both hospitals; freestanding EDs at Tidewatch Dr (Novant) and 8 Parkside Dr — opened July 21, 2026, 10,000 sq ft, 10 treatment rooms including a trauma room, per Novant (Novant) Hospital ED in Beaufort; Hilton Head Emergency & Urgent Care under construction (BMH) Hospital ED; hospital states ACS-verified Level I trauma center (Memorial) Both hospitals; no freestanding ED located (CMS)
Nearest clinic to Sun City Okatie Primary Care, 40 Okatie Center Blvd S (Novant) Okatie Medical Pavilion with Express Care, 122 Okatie Center Blvd N (BMH) Bluffton/Okatie primary care closed end of December 2025; none verified since (WTOC) Primary Care – Bluffton, 10 Oak Forest Rd; new-patient status volatile (see text) (SJC)
Planned facilities Bluffton Medical Center, 50 beds, CON approved March 24, 2025, opening 2028 per Novant (Novant); SC DPH hearing notice states 196,500 sq ft, $320,049,946.79, 33 transferred + 17 new beds (SC DPH) Bluffton Community Hospital, 28 beds, ~$103M, CON approved March 24, 2025; completion late 2026, patients early 2027 (BMH, updates) Freestanding ERs in Pooler and Richmond Hill, GA; no dates (Memorial) None located
Admitting hospital for local clinics Not published (Novant) Not published; one hospital (BMH) Not published Not published (SJC)
Patient portal / EHR MyNovant — Epic MyChart (Novant) Two portals: MEDITECH for the hospital (BMH), athenahealth for practices (BMH) MyChart, login at mychart.hca-south.com (Memorial); the hospital’s About Us page also promotes MyHealthONE (Memorial); both re-fetched August 25, 2026 MEDITECH (Expanse) (SJC)
Cross-system records sharing Not published (Novant) Not published (BMH) No named system-to-system exchange published; the MyChart page says the record “can be shared by participating doctors, hospitals, and patients” without naming any (Memorial), and the About Us page describes patient-directed sharing — “share your health records with a physician or caregiver” (Memorial) Not published (SJC)
Provider-based (facility-fee) notice No South Carolina notice located; NC provider-based clinics named in Novant’s policy (Novant) Not located (BMH) Not located (Memorial) Not located (SJC)
Medicare participation Both hospitals Medicare-certified (CMS) Medicare-certified (CMS) Medicare-certified (CMS) Both hospitals Medicare-certified (CMS)
Medicare Advantage networks Not researched — check your plan’s directory Not researched Not researched Not researched
Financial assistance SC policy: free emergency or medically necessary care at or below 300% of the federal poverty guidelines, with service-area, coverage and asset conditions and stated exclusions; next review December 2027 (policy). The separately announced 300%-FPL expansion of December 2024 applies to NC facilities (Novant) Up to 100% discount for medically necessary care; income under 300% of federal poverty guidelines per the May 2026 summary; elective excluded (BMH) 0–200% FPL: 100% charity discount; 201–400%: expanded assistance on balances over $1,500 (Memorial) Reduced fees by income and household size; thresholds not stated on the page (SJC)
Price transparency file Present — JSON for both SC hospitals; page dated April 24, 2026 (Novant) Present — CSV, 2026 (BMH) Present (Memorial) Present — JSON for both hospitals, effective July 1, 2025 (SJC)
Telehealth / nurse line Not published Not published 24/7 Consult-A-Nurse, (844) 706-8773 (Memorial) Not published
CMS overall star rating Hilton Head 2 of 5; Coastal Carolina 4 of 5 (CMS) 4 of 5 (CMS) 1 of 5 (CMS) St. Joseph’s 2 of 5; Candler 2 of 5 (CMS)
HCAHPS summary star / “would definitely recommend” Hilton Head 2 / 55%; Coastal Carolina 3 / 61% (CMS) 3 / 62% (CMS) 2 / 64% (CMS) St. Joseph’s 3 / 75%; Candler 3 / 69% (CMS)
ED median wait, discharged patients Hilton Head 166 min; Coastal Carolina 130 min (CMS) 221 min (CMS) 162 min (CMS) St. Joseph’s 203 min; Candler 196 min (CMS)
Hospital-wide readmission Not published, CMS footnote 4 (CMS) Not published, footnote 4 (CMS) Not published, footnote 4 (CMS) Not published, footnote 4 (CMS)
Leapfrog Safety Grade, Spring 2026 Hilton Head C (Leapfrog); Coastal Carolina B (Leapfrog) C (Leapfrog) B (Leapfrog) Candler: Grade Not Available (Leapfrog); St. Joseph’s: not retrievable in this research (Leapfrog ratings site)
Accreditation Not verified; the Joint Commission’s public lookup could not be retrieved (JC) States it is fully Joint Commission accredited (BMH), with hip and knee certification (BMH); not verified with the Joint Commission About page states Joint Commission accreditation with stroke and joint-replacement certifications (Memorial); not verified with the Joint Commission Awards page states Joint Commission accreditation and five-time Magnet designation, a nursing credential from a different body (SJC); not independently verified
Enforcement records located None located in this research (HHS OCR search) None located in this research Open California district-attorney investigation of California facilities (10-K); two HHS-OIG settlements naming pre-HCA entities, both re-fetched on the live OIG site August 25, 2026 (2015, 2017) None located in this research

About the quality measures

The CMS figures above are as published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in the Care Compare hospital datasets released August 13, 2026 (data modified July 22, 2026): the overall star rating from Hospital General Information (CMS); patient experience from the HCAHPS survey covering October 1, 2024 through September 30, 2025 (CMS); the emergency-department median wait (measure OP-18b, discharged patients) for the same period (CMS); and the hospital-wide readmission measure for July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025 (CMS).

HCAHPS is CMS’s standardized patient-experience survey, sent to a sample of discharged patients. The samples here are small and the response rates modest — 469 to 1,545 surveys per hospital, response rates of 16% to 29% (CMS) — worth remembering before reading much into a few percentage points. CMS’s own caveat applies to the star rating: it summarizes a selected set of measures, and hospitals are not measured on identical sets.

On readmissions, the hospital-wide measure is marked “Not Available,” CMS footnote 4 — data suppressed for one or more quarters — for all six hospitals. That is a reporting status, not a deficiency, and this guide does not speculate about the reason. Condition-specific 30-day readmission rates (heart failure, pneumonia, COPD, heart attack; July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2025) were published for these hospitals, and every published rate is in CMS’s “No Different Than the National Rate” category; the heart-attack measure is marked “number of cases too small” for Coastal Carolina and Candler (CMS).

Leapfrog is a private nonprofit that issues letter grades twice a year from a voluntary hospital survey plus public data. “Grade Not Available” means Leapfrog published no grade for that cycle; it is not a failing grade, and no explicit reason for Candler’s is given on Leapfrog’s page, which does carry a footnote that results are based on limited data due to a reported cybersecurity event, natural disaster, or CMS extraordinary circumstance. St. Joseph’s Hospital’s Spring 2026 grade could not be retrieved here; Leapfrog’s separate ratings site shows a survey submission dated June 24, 2026 with no letter grade displayed (Leapfrog ratings site).

Accreditation is not verified anywhere in this guide. The Joint Commission’s public lookup could not be retrieved, so every accreditation statement above is the hospital’s own.

Questions worth asking

These are the questions this research could not answer for you, because the answers are not published. They are short enough to ask at a front desk.

  1. Which hospital does this practice admit to? For Novant: Hilton Head or Coastal Carolina? For St. Joseph’s/Candler: St. Joseph’s or Candler? And does the answer change if I arrive by ambulance?
  2. Is this office owned by the health system, or independent? It determines the portal, the financial-assistance policy, and whether a facility fee is possible.
  3. Is this location a hospital outpatient department that bills a separate facility fee — will I get two bills? Ask whether the practice has told you in writing; do not assume a notice is required.
  4. Does my Medicare Advantage or commercial plan list this hospital and this clinic’s billing entity as in-network? Name the entity when you call — Hilton Head Medical Center, LLC, or Savannah Health Services, LLC, for instance — and write down the date you checked.
  5. If I go to a freestanding emergency department — Tidewatch, Novant’s Parkside Drive site, or Beaufort Memorial’s coming Hilton Head location — whose license and billing apply, and which hospital would I be transferred to if admitted?
  6. When the two Bluffton hospitals open — Beaufort Memorial late 2026 or early 2027, Novant in 2028 — will my admitting hospital change, and which one does my practice plan to use?
  7. Which financial-assistance policy applies to me, and what are its income thresholds? For Novant, ask for the South Carolina policy, not the North Carolina one — the South Carolina document sets 300% of the federal poverty guidelines plus service-area, coverage and asset conditions, and asking confirms which conditions apply to you. For Beaufort Memorial, ask whether your physician is on the covered-provider list. For Memorial Health, ask which poverty-level band you fall in. For St. Joseph’s/Candler, ask for the written policy.
  8. Which portal holds my records — Beaufort Memorial has two separate logins, and Memorial Health’s site names two portal brands, MyChart and MyHealthONE — and can a doctor in another system see them?
  9. Where does my doctor want me to go, for what kind of emergency, and would EMS take me somewhere else anyway? For major trauma, the only hospital in this comparison whose own pages state Level I trauma-center status is Memorial Health in Savannah, about 42 minutes away by free-flow estimate.
  10. What does a lower CMS star or Leapfrog grade actually measure, and does it cover the service I would use?
  11. Is the hospital-wide readmission measure still “not available” for my hospital, or has CMS published it since?
  12. For the Savannah hospitals: how do out-of-state rules and ambulance transfers from South Carolina affect me?

What this research could not establish

Sources

Official datasets and registries

Leapfrog

Novant Health

Beaufort Memorial

HCA Healthcare / Memorial Health

St. Joseph’s/Candler

Other

Have a correction, a source, or an idea for a future Deep Dive? Let us know.