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Friday, 11 July, 2008 5:37 PM
U.S. News Media
Group Releases 19th Edition of America's Best Hospitals
2008
Rankings Include 170 Hospitals and Medical Centers in 16 Specialties,
19 Hospitals Included in "Honor Roll"
Photo
courtesy of www.imc.jhmi.edu
Johns
Hopkins Hospital in Balitmore.
WASHINGTON
-- 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.
Source: U.S. News Media Group
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