U.S. News releases 2014-15 Best Hospitals rankings

U.S. News & World Report released its annual Best Hospitals rankings for 2014-2015.

This edition of rankings marks the first time the publication assembled the list using a new methodology, according to U.S. News. Not only did the publication double the weight of patient safety in 12 specialties from 5 to 10 percent of the hospital's overall score, it reduced the weight of hospital reputation for those specialties from 32.5 to 27.5 percent.

U.S. News credits the methodology change to increased public reporting of "rigorously studied" hospital quality measures. A study released earlier this year criticized what it called U.S. News' outsized emphasis on hospital reputations in its previous methodology, noting a weak correlation between hospital prices and reputations, and patient outcomes.

U.S. News editor Ben Harder disputed the researchers' claims that the rankings were "largely based on reputation," noting that even before the new methodology, the publication used "objective, primarily Medicare-derived quality measures such as mortality, volume and patient safety indicators to calculate 67.5 percent of each hospital's rank-determining score in the four specialties analyzed," FierceHealthcare previously reported.

In addition to ranking the best hospitals in 16 specialties--including cancer, diabetes/endocrinology, rehabilitation, geriatrics and orthopedics--at the national and regional level, U.S. News' rankings include the Honor Roll, a ranking of hospitals with top scores in at least six specialties.

The top 10 hospitals on this year's Honor Roll were:

  1. Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota

  2. Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston

  3. Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore

  4. Cleveland Clinic

  5. UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles

  6. New York-Presbyterian University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell in New York City

  7. Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Presbyterian in Philadelphia

  8. UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco

  9. Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston

  10. Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago

To learn more:
- read the rankings
- here's the Honor Roll
- read U.S. News' explanation of the methodology change