U.S. News & World Report is out with its latest ranking of the country’s best hospitals, this time with the addition of data on Medicare Advantage-covered patients and much more outpatient care encounters than in years past.
The closely watched 2024-2025 list, which reviews data for over 4,500 of the nation’s hospitals, designates 466 of these as “Best Regional Hospitals” and 160 as “Best Hospitals,” designations that the outlet said reflect excellence in multiple factors of patient outcomes and safety.
The 35th annual release also names 20 of the nation’s hospitals with “exceptional breadth and depth of excellence” to an unranked “Honor Roll.” Compared to last year’s collection of 22 hospitals, this year’s list adds Duke University Hospital and Mayo Clinic’s Arizona campus but drops Barnes-Jewish Hospital, University of Michigan Health-Ann Arbor, UT Southwestern Medical Center and Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
U.S. News’ review also delivers categorized performance ratings for 20 procedures and conditions. Here, a rated hospital could receive a “High Performing” designation, suggesting above-average performance, for a hip replacement, among the other procedures and conditions.
For 15 medical specialties, the publication also outlines ordinal rankings for hospitals nationwide. Of note, Mayo Clinic’s Rochester hospital took home the number one spot for three different specialties: Diabetes & Endocrinology, Gastroenterology & GI Surgery and Pulmonology & Lung Surgery.
U.S. News also publishes ordinal rankings at the state- and metro-area level. Additionally, this year’s release includes a new category that highlights 98 facilities as the “Best Regional Hospitals for Equitable Access.”
“Choosing the right hospital to match your needs shouldn’t be a guessing game,” Ben Harder, chief of health analysis and managing editor at U.S. News, said in a release. “The 2024-2025 edition of Best Hospitals provides patients and their families clear, data-driven insights on hospital performance and empowers Americans to choose the facility best suited to their specific health care needs.”
U.S. News rankings are largely based on objective outcomes and split into two different methodologies for specialty rankings and procedures and conditions ratings. Most specialties also incorporate input from board-certified physicians as a small portion of the grading rubric. Best hospitals rankings for regions, specialties and the Honor Roll combine data from several government and industry sources.
The methodologies undergo changes from year to year. Alongside changes to the handling of inter-hospital transfers and observation stays, this time around the outlet and Harder highlighted the “unprecedented” amount of data they reviewed with the addition of more outpatient outcomes and, for 11 specialties, outcomes for patients covered under a Medicare Advantage plan.
“This will allow us to conduct a more comprehensive evaluation of the hospitals because patient populations are better represented with this additional data,” Min Hee Seo, senior health data scientist at U.S. News & World Report, said. The publication noted that Medicare Advantage outcomes will also be incorporated into the procedures and conditions methodology starting next year.
Pushback against annual rankings lists like U.S. News’ bubbled to the surface in late 2022, with critics of the medical school, law school and, to a lesser extent, hospital reviews arguing that the system indirectly incentivizes certain areas rewarded in the methodology while leaving other underserved foci in the dust.
Though a few health systems such as St. Luke’s University Health Network and the University of Pennsylvania Health System decided to stop submitting data to the publication in the wake of the critiques, the hospital industry has by and large opted not to pull out of the rankings. Additionally, U.S. News has said it takes those concerns into account when devising its year-to-year methodology changes.