U.S. News & World Report released its Best Hospitals rankings for 2020-21 on July 28.
To compile the 31st annual ranking, U.S. News compared more than 4,500 hospitals nationwide across 16 specialties and 10 procedures and conditions. For the 2020-21 list, 134 hospitals were nationally ranked in at least one specialty, and 563 hospitals were ranked among the Best Regional Hospitals in a state or metro area. Thirty-seven hospitals received a high-performing rating in all 10 procedures and conditions.
Notable updates to this year's methodology include a quality measure for a hospital's transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR, program; the inclusion of outpatient Medicare claims when calculating hospitals' volumes for a knee replacement rating; and an updated home outcome measure. Data used in the ranking predate the COVID-19 pandemic.
U.S. News hospital rankings have and will continue to focus on providing patients insight into hospitals' outcomes and patient safety performance to help them select care in specific specialties, like orthopedics, cardiac care and oncology. But Ben Harder, who oversees methodology and data analysis for the Honor Roll, said the discussion around what constitutes a "best hospital" is evolving.
"We've begun to develop a set of measures and ultimately we intend to have a methodology for evaluating hospitals' performance in health equity," Mr. Harder said. In practice, a health equity ranking could be relevant for a patient in an underserved population who might be choosing between two hospitals with similar care — but one has no racial gap in outcomes, and one does.
"Right now, it is all about outcomes and quality of patient care across 26 specialties and procedures and conditions. With the additions of measures of health equity and other aspects of care, that [will one day give] us yet another lens to add into that broader picture of which hospitals are the best," he added.
Here are the top 20 hospitals named to U.S. News' 2020-21 Best Hospitals Honor Roll, including ties:
1. Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn.)
2. Cleveland Clinic
3. Johns Hopkins Hospital (Baltimore)
4. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia and Cornell (New York City)
4. UCLA Medical Center (Los Angeles)
6. Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston)
7. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (Los Angeles)
8. UCSF Medical Center (San Francisco)
9. NYU Langone Hospitals (New York City)
10. Northwestern Memorial Hospital (Chicago)
11. University of Michigan Hospitals-Michigan Medicine (Ann Arbor)
12. Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston)
13. Stanford Health Care-Stanford Hospital (Palo Alto, Calif.)
14. Mount Sinai Hospital (New York City)
15. Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Presbyterian (Philadelphia)
16. Mayo Clinic-Phoenix
17. Rush University Medical Center (Chicago)
18. Barnes-Jewish Hospital (Saint Louis)
18. Keck Medical Center of USC (Los Angeles)
20. Houston Methodist Hospital
To learn more about this year's updates to U.S. News' methodology, click here. To view U.S. News' full methodology, click here.