Methodology: U.S. News & World Report 2019-20 Best Hospitals

Abstract

The Best Hospitals specialty rankings assess hospital performance in 16 specialties or specialty areas, from Cancer to Urology. In 12 of these, whether and how high a hospital is ranked is determined by an extensive data-driven analysis combining performance measures in three primary dimensions of healthcare: structure, process/expert opinion, and outcomes. In the four other specialties, ranking relies solely on expert opinion.

The structural measures include hospital volume, nurse staffing and other resources that define the hospital environment. The data source for most structural measures is the American Hospital Association (AHA) Annual Survey. Additional resources include the National Cancer Institute’s list of NIH-designated cancer centers and the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s roster of Nurse Magnet hospitals.

Process is represented by two factors. One is a hospital’s ability to develop and sustain a system that delivers high-quality care, as determined by the surveys of board-certified physicians cited above. The other, is a new indicator of patient experience. The basis for this score is the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) patient satisfaction surveys. A hospital's linear mean overall score from HCAHPS was used to calculate the patient experience score. For the 11 cancer specialty hospitals exempt from the CMS Inpatient Prospective Payment System, analogous data from the PPS-exempt Cancer Hospital (PCH) HCAHPS dataset were used. The patient experience score is worth 5% of the total score.