U.S. News & World Report released an analysis of the 2018-19 Best Children's Hospitals to the 118 participating organizations June 5 and provided an update to its methodology for the upcoming list, which is set to be published June 26.
The data aggregation process for the 2018-19 list began last fall when U.S. News' data contractor, RTI International, convened 12 specialty-focused working groups made up of pediatric quality experts to advise the publication on each of the 10 pediatric specialities ranked by U.S. News. Hospitals were also asked to complete the publication's annual Pediatric Hospital Survey.
U.S. News editors noted changes to the publication's methodology for collecting data for the 2018-19 list were minimal and included dropping certain survey items and altering its scoring of data from particular organizations.
The publication also focused on obtaining comparable data from each hospital that submitted information to U.S. News' Pediatric Hospital Survey. To do so, the publication dropped certain items from the annual survey, including neonatology readmissions and data related to hospitalwide EMR utilization, among other items.
During its data aggregation stage, U.S. News did not identify any instances of hospitals intentionally misreporting information.
The 2018-19 Best Children's Hospital list will be published on June 26, along with a full report detailing its methodology.
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