The 34 hospitals most similar to America's top 10

A new data visualizer shows the 10 most similar hospitals to any one benchmark hospital, challenging traditional, ordinal rank lists like those from U.S. News & World Report.

SimilarityIndex | Hospitals comes from Trilliant Health Labs, which created the tool so health economy stakeholders can learn how similar a selected benchmark hospital is to — or different from — highly regarded U.S. hospitals. 

Users can compare hospitals to find peers in either quality alone or aggregate — the latter reflects an equally weighted combination of measurements in the categories of hospital quality (including 30-day mortality and readmission rates), outpatient service line, financial (including operating margin and average inpatient service costs), patient mix and market share. (The below list features aggregate peers.) 

Trilliant indexed 2,159 short-term acute care hospitals, omitting critical access hospitals, safety-net hospitals, government-operated hospitals, Kaiser Permanente hospitals, children's hospitals and others. Inclusion criteria and detail on the methodology of SimilarityIndex | Hospitals can be found on page 6 of the primer that can be found here. 

"The 800+ 'Top 100 Hospitals' may be useful for marketing campaigns, but they are useless for developing evidence-based strategies," Hal Andrews, CEO of Trilliant Health, said in a statement. "Evidence-based strategies depend on accurate benchmarks against relevant peers. The healthcare industry is both capital-intensive and capital constrained, and applying mathematical rigor to benchmarking and strategic planning reduces the risk of suboptimal capital allocation for healthcare providers, suppliers and payers. Our SimilarityIndex | Hospitals application allows stakeholders to understand how hospitals truly compare with respect to quality and other important metrics."

Becker's took the 10 top-ranked hospitals from the latest U.S. News and World Report's Honor Roll to find their five most similar aggregate peers. Their similarity scores are listed. 

1. Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn.)

1. Michigan Medicine (Ann Arbor): 84.80
2. Mayo Clinic Health System (Mankato, Minn.): 83.57
3. UP Health System (Marquette, Mich.): 81.31 
4. Stormont Vail Hospital (Topeka, Kan.): 81.08
5. Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (Lebanon, N.H.): 80.97 

2. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (Los Angeles)

1. Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center (Los Angeles): 89.77
2. The University of Chicago Medical Center: 89.41
3. UT Southwestern's William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital (Dallas): 89.08
4. Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston): 88.33
5. MedStar Georgetown University Hospital (Washington, D.C.): 88.26

3. NYU Langone Hospitals (New York)

1. Hospital of University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia): 75.18
2. Northside Hospital (Atlanta): 74.99
3. Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston): 73.99
4. UT Southwestern's William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital (Dallas): 73.59
5. NorthShore University HealthSystem's Evanston (Ill.) Hospital: 72.96

4. Cleveland Clinic 

1. Vanderbilt University Medical Center (Nashville, Tenn.): 76.19
2. Duke University Hospital (Durham, N.C.): 73.31
3. The University of Kansas Hospital (Kansas City): (72.33) 
4. Strong Memorial Hospital (Rochester, N.Y.): (71.98) 
5. University of Utah Hospital (Salt Lake City): (71.27) 

5. (tie) Johns Hopkins Hospital (Baltimore)

1. Northwestern Memorial Hospital (Chicago): 89.02
2. Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston): 88.68
3. UT Southwestern's William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital (Dallas): 73.59
4. Houston Methodist Hospital: 87.90
5. The University of Chicago Medical Center: 87.62

5. (tie) UCLA Medical Center (Los Angeles)

1. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (Los Angeles): 89.77
2. UCSF Medical Center (San Francisco): 89.36
3. Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center (Houston): 87.74
4. UC Davis Medical Center (Sacramento, Calif.): 87.17
5. The University of Chicago Medical Center: 86.61

7. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital

1. Mount Sinai Hospital (New York): 86.93
2. Sharp Chula Vista (Calif.) Medical Center: 83.29
3. Montefiore Medical Center (Bronx, N.Y.): 83.28
4. Santa Clara Valley Medical Center (San Jose, Calif.): 82.91
5. Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center (Los Angeles): 82.64

8. Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston)

1. Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston): 91.40 
2. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Boston): 90.29
3. Tufts Medical Center (Boston): 88.31 
4. The University of Chicago Medical Center: 88.04
5. Northwestern Memorial Hospital (Chicago): 87.72

9. Northwestern Memorial Hospital (Chicago)

1. UT Southwestern's William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital (Dallas): 92.65
2. The University of Chicago Medical Center: 90.99
3. Loyola University Medical Center (Maywood, Ill.): 89.43
4. The Johns Hopkins Hospital (Baltimore): 89.02
5. Mercy Medical Center (Baltimore): 88.98

10. Stanford (Calif.) Health Care

1. UC Davis Medical Center (Sacramento, Calif.): 86.85
2. UCSF Medical Center (San Francisco): 86.02
3. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (Los Angeles): 82.12
4. Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston): 81.90
5. Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center (Los Angeles): 81.19