U.S. News & World Report released key dates and facts about its upcoming 2019 physician survey, which evaluates physicians' opinions on the best hospitals for complex or challenging diagnoses.
Five things to know:
1. RTI International, which conducts the survey on behalf of U.S. News, looks at thousands of nominations every year to create a specialty-specific reputation score for each hospital. These scores are combined with measures, such as risk-adjusted survival, to determine the news publication's best hospitals and best children's hospitals rankings.
2. Eligibility for the survey is determined by board certification. RTI separately surveys two groups of eligible physicians: users and non-users of online healthcare professional network Doximity.
3. Doximity users and non-users will be defined based on their status as of Nov. 15. Physicians who join Doximity after Nov. 15 will be treated as non-users.
4. A random sample of non-users will be surveyed by mail beginning in January 2019. Physicians will be invited by email when the survey is accessible to them.
5. U.S. News is advising hospital administrators that the hospital name in the Doximity survey materials (the name on a list of potential matches when physicians search for a hospital to nominate), will be the name on that hospital's U.S. News profile as of Jan. 10. If the name is out of date, hospital administrators can log into the Best Hospitals Dashboard and submit a name-change request no later than Jan. 10.