Looks like Boston Children’s Hospital isn’t the only local medical center that’s tops in the nation this year.
US News & World Report today released its annual list of the 20 best hospitals in the United States, and two from Boston made the cut: Massachusetts General Hospital was ranked second overall in the nation, while Brigham and Women’s ranked 13th.
The top-rated hospital this year, according to US News, was the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
Among specialties, MGH was ranked fifth in the nation for cardiology and heart surgery. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute also received special honors, as it was ranked fifth in the cancer specialty.
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This year’s list of US News & World Report’s best hospitals:
1. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.
2. Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston
3. Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore
4. Cleveland Clinic
5. New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia and Cornell, N.Y.
6. UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles
7. UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco
8. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles
9. NYU Langone Hospitals, New York, N.Y.
10. Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago
11. University of Michigan Hospitals-Michigan Medicine, Ann Arbor
12. Stanford Health Care-Stanford Hospital, Palo Alto, Calif.
13. Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston
14. Mount Sinai Hospital, New York
15. UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside, Pittsburgh
16. Keck Hospital of USC, Los Angeles
17. University of Wisconsin Hospitals, Madison
18. Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Presbyterian, Philadelphia (tie)
18. Mayo Clinic-Phoenix (tie)
20. Houston Methodist Hospital (tie)
20. Yale New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Conn. (tie)
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The 2019-20 rankings evaluated nearly every community hospital in America, and ultimately drew from a universe of 4,653 facilities, according to the US News & World Report’s methodology.
However, US News cautions that the rankings should be used more as a starting point for potential patients, describing it as a tool that can help people find “the best care for the most serious or complicated medical conditions and procedures,” the methodology states.
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The rankings were produced by US News with RTI International, a North Carolina-based research firm.
A hospital’s overall score reflects performance in five main areas: structure, or the hospital resources related directly to patient care; the process of delivering care, which encompasses diagnosis, treatment, prevention, and patient education; and the risk-adjusted mortality rate, which is the likelihood of death when the patient’s condition and the complexity of the case are taken into account, according to the ranking’s methodology. The patient’s experience and a hospital’s public transparency is also taken into account.
Many of the individual measures in the data-driven rankings come from secondary data sources such as the American Hospital Association’s Annual Survey Database.
US News warns that it’s not quite fair to compare previous year rankings with the newest list, since the methodology has been adjusted. That being said, MGH last year came in fourth, while Brigham and Women’s just made the “honor roll” by ranking 20th.
The year before that, MGH also ranked fourth, but the Brigham didn’t make the Top 20 cut at all — something the hospital blamed on a new US News methodology change. (In the past, the Brigham has ranked as high as No. 6 on the list, which has now been published for about three decades.)
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In June, Boston Children’s Hospital claimed the top spot nationwide for pediatric medical centers for the sixth consecutive year, according to US News, with several of its specialties — including cancer, nephrology, neurology and neurosurgery, orthopedics, and urology — claiming their own No. 1 rankings.