U.S. News & World Report's latest ranking of the nation’s best children’s hospitals is live with a first-time focus on those providing behavioral care.
The 18th iteration of the highly watched collection names 50 top hospitals across 11 specialties. The publication said its methodology for these is “broadly similar” to its predecessor, outside of the addition of the eleventh specialty, behavioral health.
“There's been a mental health crisis among our youth, exacerbated by the pandemic, and so that's really raised the profile and importance of helping families find the right care for children suffering from mental health conditions, but also various developmental problem,” Ben Harder, managing editor and chief of health analysis at U.S. News, said of the addition.
U.S. News’ other big change is the shift away from ordinal rankings for its “Honor Roll” list of 10 overall top performers, bringing the Best Children’s Hospital list in line with the publication’s last two reports on high performing adult-focused hospitals. That approach had seen Boston Children’s Hospital claim the top pediatric spot for nine years running until being dethroned by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center last year.
The new unranked collection of Honor Roll children’s hospitals has many of the familiar names from last year’s top 10 with two exceptions: Children’s Hospital Colorado and Seattle Children’s Hospital. They claimed the spots from UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh (last year’s eighth place) and Johns Hopkins Children’s Center (last year’s tenth place).
The full 2024-25 U.S. News Best Children’s Hospitals honor roll is as follows:
- Boston Children's Hospital
- Children's Hospital Colorado, Aurora
- Children's Hospital Los Angeles
- Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
- Children's National Hospital, Washington, D.C.
- Cincinnati Children's
- Nationwide Children's Hospital, Columbus, Ohio
- Rady Children's Hospital, San Diego
- Seattle Children's Hospital
- Texas Children's Hospital, Houston
The collection still gives ordinal rankings for specific states and regions, though these are limited to areas where U.S. News has previously published rankings—in effect excluding the new behavioral health specialty from geographic rankings.
The 10 Honor Roll children’s hospitals are selected based on their collective ratings across the different specialties, and several are top-performers across multiple specialties, Harder said.
Among the standouts who secured top specialty rankings are: Boston Children’s Hospital, which reigned over neonatology and pediatric urology; Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which was on top for pediatric diabetes and endocrinology; Cincinnati Children’s, which claimed number one for pediatric gastroenterology and GI surgery as well as pediatric pulmonology and lung surgery; and Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston, which led pediatric cardiology and heart surgery as well as pediatric nephrology.
The Best Children’s Hospitals list is an annual project headed by U.S. News and research firm RTI International. It includes surveyed operational, outcomes and safety data from 108 facilities (of 198 that were eligible) as well as opinion surveys with over 36,000 expert physicians. Of those hospitals, 88 were ranked within the top 50 in at least one measured specialty.
Beyond this year’s rankings and lists, Harder said in a recent blog post the publication has heard from children’s hospital heads that “the personnel time and effort hospitals must commit to completing the Pediatric Hospital Survey is a heavy burden.” To reduce the load and attract new respondents, U.S. News and its partner RTI International will begin a multiyear effort to “meaningfully reduce” the length of the survey beginning next year, he said.
Recent years have seen rankings from U.S. News and others come under increased scrutiny. Some critics noted that the superlatives given to participants become paid marketing materials, while others noted that the weighting of specific conditions within the ranking methodology could systemically disadvantage groups impacted by other diseases.
The concerns led to a couple of health systems like St. Luke’s University Health Network and the University of Pennsylvania Health System dropping out of the adult hospital survey, though the children’s hospital list was mostly spared from public pushback. U.S. News has said it has taken critics’ concerns into account when revising its methodologies.