Medical Rating

Overview
Medical Rating is a measure of your ship's capability to augment the efforts of your doctors. Medical rating is primarily increased by installing one or more Medical Bay components. The ship's rating is additive across all components that have a listed medical rating. Your ship's medical rating has many uses:

When a character is dropped to 0 HP in crew or ship combat but survives their Death Save, medical rating is one of the primary factors in what their HP is after death. This is especially key for ship combat, because if you survive your Death Save but end up with 10 HP, you're likely to be right into the hopper on the next torp!

This is the method used to determine the HP of anyone who survives all other events as well, such as losing all HP or near death experiences during orbital operations like Spying and Exploring.

For ship combat healing Talents (both during and after), the amount healed is set by doctor skill, while the number of healed characters is dictated by the medical rating. This doctor skill is that of the doctor using the talent, not the aggregate of all of your doctors together. Thus, having multiple doctors does not help you much if you don't have one or more good medical bays. Multiple medical bays combine their medical ratings into your ships overall medical rating additively.

When making doctor tests during travel, medical rating plays a big part in your success; specifically it adds 3 standard dice per point of rating. That's effectively the same as 1.5 doctor skill per point of rating applied to these rolls.