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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — The annual U.S. News & World Report's Best Hospitals rankings, released Tuesday, have named the Mayo Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, and New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia and Cornell, as the top five "honor roll" hospitals for 2019-20.
Researchers at RTI International, a nonprofit research institute, and U.S. News collected and analyzed the data behind the rankings using a respected and well-established methodology, which combined original survey data with secondary analyses of data from various sources, primarily the American Hospital Association and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. This year, the rankings introduced some significant changes including a new set of outcomes — patient survival and discharge to home — and for the first time a measure of patient experience.
This year's version ranks hospitals in 16 different adult specialties, ranging from cancer to heart disease to respiratory disorders and urology. The Best Children's Hospitals rankings in 10 pediatric specialties were published online in June. Both sets of rankings will be included in the August print issue of U.S. News & World Report.
For the Best Hospitals rankings, the researchers looked at more than 4,500 hospitals, and just 165 different hospitals were ranked in at least one specialty.
To qualify for ranking consideration, hospitals in 12 of those specialties had to be a teaching hospital, have a sufficient number of beds or a sufficient level of important medical technology. To remain eligible, hospitals had to meet a series of progressively tougher standards to be ranked in those 12 specialties. In the other four specialties, where procedures are often performed on an outpatient basis or Medicare data are unavailable, hospitals were evaluated based on expert opinion from specialized physicians.
For consideration within a specialty, a hospital must have performed a significant number of defined procedures or had to have been identified as a best hospital by at least 1 percent of physicians in the U.S. News & World Report expert opinion surveys in the past three years.
Hospitals received a score based on care-related considerations such as technology, nursing, expert opinion, survival and patient experience. These represent the three key aspects of quality hospital care: structure, process and outcomes. Hospitals were ranked by their scores.
In addition to compiling the rankings, RTI conducts an ongoing evaluation of the study methodology. More information about the methodology is available at www.rti.org/besthospitals.
