Dive Brief:
- U.S. News & World Report released on Tuesday its rankings of 2016-17 "best hospitals."
- In this year's honor roll, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota dethroned Massachusetts General Hospital, which ranked No. 3 in the list. Cleveland Clinic took home the silver medal by coming in second place.
- In addition, the publisher ranked hospitals by specialty and issued regional rankings.
Dive Insight:
Marketers go into full swing around this time each year when hospitals start getting graded by third-party organizations, as noted by STAT News, adding these rankings all are subjective pointing to U.S .News & World Report’s top five hospitals. Of those, only Mayo Clinic received a five-star rating in CMS' hospital star-rating system released last month.
"We strive to provide patients with the highest-quality information on hospitals available," Ben Harder, chief of health analysis at U.S. News, said in a prepared statement. "Driving for broader transparency and evaluating hospitals in a comprehensive, fair way reflects that mission."
The methodologies that U.S. News used during its assessment included patient survival, number of patients, infection, and adequacy of nurse staffing. Also, for the the first time this year, the publisher evaluated abdominal aortic aneurysm repair, aortic valve surgery, colon cancer surgery, and lung cancer surgery.
The rankings, for which 25 specialties were compared in nearly 5,000 medical centers, were developed in conjunction with research organization RTI International and the report's launch was sponsored by Fidelity Investments.
For specialty rankings, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center came in first place in cancer specialty category and the Cleveland Clinic was first in the cardiology and heart surgery category.