U.S. News Media Group Releases 19th Edition of America’s Best Hospitals
Washington D.C. - U.S. News Media Group today announced the 2008 publication of America’s Best Hospitals, accessible today online at www.usnews.com/besthospitals and on sale at newsstands Monday, July 14.
Authoritative and influential, the 2008 America’s Best Hospitals guide ranks 170 medical centers nationwide in 16 specialties--with full data available online for another 1,500 that are unranked. In addition, the Honor Roll singles out the “best of the best.”
The 16 ranked specialties are cancer; gastroenterology; ear, nose, and throat; endocrinology; geriatric care; gynecology; heart and heart surgery; kidney disease; neurology and neurosurgery; ophthalmology; orthopedics; psychiatry; rehabilitation; respiratory disorders; rheumatology; and urology.
“The America’s Best Hospitals rankings provide readers with trusted material during some of life’s most concerning times – hospitalization,” said Brian Kelly, editor of U.S.News & World Report.“Our rankings highlight the internal culture of excellence embraced by caregivers in the great hospitals throughout the U.S.”
“Talent and money alone don’t put hospitals in the rankings,” agreed Best Hospitals editor Avery Comarow. “The truly best hospitals are never satisfied,” he said. “Of course they have high medical standards, but the emphasis is not only on doing well, but always doing better--squeezing another few percentage points out of the infection rate, improving the quality of life of elderly patients besides helping more of them survive.”
Of the 170 medical centers ranked in the 2008 America's Best Hospitals, 19 earned Honor Roll status, demonstrating excellence and breadth of expertise by ranking at or near the top in at least six specialties. The top 10 hospitals in the 2008 Honor Roll are:
1. Johns Hopkins Hospital (Baltimore)
2. Mayo Clinic (Rochester, MN)
3. Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center (Los Angeles)
4. Cleveland Clinic
5. Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston)
6. New York-Presbyterian University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell
7. University of California, San Francisco Medical Center
8. Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston)
8. Duke University Medical Center (Durham, NC)
10. Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia)
10. University of Washington Medical Center (Seattle)
For the full “Honor Roll” list, visit www.usnews.com/besthospitals.
In addition to the 170 hospitals that appear in one or more specialty rankings in the print magazine, the 2008 America’s Best Hospitals package includes an online consumer guide where readers can find information on more than 1,500 hospitals that qualified for rankings, but did not score high enough to be ranked (only 1 in 3 of the nation’s 5,453 hospitals did qualify).
Methodology
The rankings in 12 of the 16 specialties weigh three elements equally: reputation, death rate, and a set of care-related factors such as nursing and patient services. In these 12 specialties, hospitals have to pass through several gates to be ranked and considered a Best Hospital:
1. The first gate determines whether a hospital is eligible to be ranked at all by requiring that any of three conditions be met--to be a teaching hospital, to be affiliated with a teaching hospital, or to have at least six important medical technologies from a defined list of 13.
2. The second gate determines whether a hospital is eligible to be ranked in a particular specialty. To be eligible, the hospital had to either have at least a specified volume in certain procedures and conditions over three years, or had to have been nominated in our yearly specialist survey.
3. The third gate is whether a hospital does well enough to be ranked, based on its reputation, death rate, and factors like nurse staffing and technology.
In the four other specialties--ophthalmology, psychiatry, rehabilitation, and rheumatology--ranking is based solely on reputation, derived from the three most recent physician surveys.
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