U.S. News: Johns Hopkins Ranks Among Nation’s Best Hospitals

Maryland is home to one of the nation’s top hospitals, according to U.S. News & World Report. Johns Hopkins Hospital made the publication’s honor roll for 2019–2020, which featured the best hospitals in the United States, excelling across a range of specialties, from cancer to urology.

“We use a number of different measures to assess hospital quality, and we separately assess each hospital in many different specialties and services that hospitals offer,” Ben Harder, managing editor and chief of health analysis at U.S. News, told Patch.

The U.S. News hospital rankings for 2019-20 encompass the honor roll, top-ranked hospitals in 12 specialty categories and the top ranked hospitals by state and metro region.

In Maryland, one hospital made the honor roll and 12 hospitals were on the state’s best hospitals list (see list below).

Honor Roll Hospitals

Hospitals that make the honor roll deliver exceptional treatment across multiple areas of care, according to U.S. News.

“The honor roll is geared to identifying hospitals that are both exceptionally good at the service they offer and offer a wide breadth of service,” Harder said, explaining that by definition, that means hospitals that are highly ranked across many or most specialties.

These hospitals made the honor roll:

• Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota (1)
• Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (2)
• Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore (3)
• Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland (4)
• New York-Presbyterian Hospital of Columbia and Cornell, New York (5)
• UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles (6)
• UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco (7)
• Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles (8)
• NYU Langone Hospitals, New York, N.Y. (9)
• Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago (10)
• University of Michigan Hospitals-Michigan Medicine, Ann Arbor (11)
• Stanford Health Care-Stanford Hospital, Palo Alto, Calif. (12)
• Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston (13)
• Mount Sinai Hospital, New York (14)
• UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside, Pittsburgh (15)
• Keck Hospital of USC, Los Angeles (16)
• University of Wisconsin Hospitals, Madison (17)
• Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Presbyterian, Philadelphia (tie) (18)
• Mayo Clinic-Phoenix (tie) (18)
• Houston Methodist Hospital (tie) (20)
• Yale New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Conn. (tie) (20)

Hospital Rankings In Maryland

“The vast majority of patients don’t need a top-ranked hospital for complex specialty care,” Harder said. “Their needs may be very well met by a best regional hospital that can offer a breadth of services.”

In Maryland, 12 met the standards for best hospitals, which means they provide a high level of care across a range of services. Several were nationally ranked in specialty areas.

The 12 specialties that hospitals were ranked for are cancer; cardiology and heart surgery; diabetes and endocrinology; ear, nose and throat; gastroenterology and GI surgery; geriatrics; gynecology; nephrology; neurology and neurosurgery; orthopedics; pulmonology and lung surgery; and urology.

Johns Hopkins is the best hospital in the nation for geriatrics, neurology and neurosurgery and rheumatology, according to U.S. News. Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute was also the third best in the country for ophthalmology, after Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami and Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia.

Hospitals that rank highly in specialty care are often regional or national referral centers, somewhere a patient may go to get a second opinion, even traveling across several states. The rankings for regional hospitals don’t require that these centers are strong in referral care because many patients don’t need that level of care.

“Most patients can find the care they need in their community or near their community, in their insurance network,” Harder said.

In Maryland, the top-ranked hospitals are as follows, according to U.S. News:

• Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore
  • Nationally ranked in 15 specialties: No. 1 for geriatrics; No. 1 in neurology and neurosurgery; No. 1 in rheumatology; No. 2 in nephrology; No. 2 in urology; No. 3 in gastroenterology and GI surgery; No. 3 in ophthalmology; No. 3 in psychiatry; No. 4 in cancer; No. 5 in diabetes and endocrinology; No. 7 in gynecology; No. 9 in pulmonology and lung surgery; No. 12 in cardiology and heart surgery; No. 13 in ear, nose and throat; No. 22 in orthopedics
  • Nationally ranked in 10 children’s specialties: No. 5 for pediatric cancer, No. 8 for pediatric neurology and neurosurgery, No. 8 for pediatric urology, No. 9 for pediatric nephrology, No. 11 for pediatric diabetes and enocrinology, No. 11 for pediatric pulmonology and lung surgery, No. 12 for neonatology, No. 19 for pediatric orthopedics, No. 25 for pediatric cardiology and heart surgery, No. 33 for pediatric diabetes and endocrinology
• University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore
  • Nationally ranked in two specialties: No. 10 in ear, nose and throat; No. 16 for cancer
  • Nationally ranked in two pediatric specialties: No. 32 fop pediatric cardiology and heart surgery
• University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center, Towson
• Anne Arundel Medical Center, Annapolis
• MedStar Union Memorial Hospital, Baltimore
• Greater Baltimore Medical Center, Towson
• Carroll Hospital Center, Westminster (tie for 7)
• Peninsula Regional Medical Center, Salisbury (tie for 7)
• University of Maryland Baltimore Washington Medical Center, Glen Burnie (tie for 7)
• Holy Cross Hospital-Silver Spring, Silver Spring (tie for 10)
• MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center, Baltimore County (tie for 10)
• Suburban Hospital, Bethesda (tie for 10)

The rankings list the best hospitals in Maryland, in the Baltimore metro area and in the D.C. metro area. There’s also a separate ranking for the best children’s hospitals in Maryland.

Patient-Centered Measures

Two patient-centered measures were part of the survey this year for the U.S. News Best Hospitals list. Data from a federally mandated survey was used to assess this measure, according to U.S. News. The survey covers topics like how good doctors and nurses were at communicating with patients and how well a patient understood how to take care of themselves after leaving the hospital.

“Obviously that’s important for patients too because they not only want to get good care and have a good outcome but also feel that what mattered to them was considered and taken into account in the care they got,” Harder said.

Analysts also looked at whether patients went home or needed more care at a rehab facility or a different hospital after leaving.

“That’s an important outcome for patients,” Harder said. “Patients do want to be home recovering and spending time with their families.”

To ensure the rankings do not penalize those that admit sicker patients, the methodology adjusts for how sick a patient was when admitted.

Methodology

U.S. News & World Report said the 2019-20 rankings evaluated nearly every community hospital in America.

Only 165 hospitals out of more than 4,500 were ranked in one specialty, while 569 hospitals were ranked among the best regional hospitals.

A hospital was ranked regionally based on its performance in delivering complex and common care, U.S. News says. The rankings are jointly produced by U.S. News and RTI International, a North Carolina-based research organization.

Read the full U.S. News best hospitals methodology.

By Patch editors Feroze Dhanoa and Elizabeth Janney

To see the story as it originally appeared on Patch.com, click here.

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