The best hospitals for 2024 in the US are revealed in a new report.
Healthgrades, the leading site for Americans to choose doctors and hospitals, ranked the 250 best-performing hospitals based on patient data from 2020 to 2022.
According to the analysis, if all U.S. hospitals performed at the same level as the top 250, 178,402 lives could have been saved.
Patients who are cared for at a top 250 hospital have a 30 per cent lower risk of dying, Dr Brad Bowman, medical director and head of data science at Healthgrades, told DailyMail.com.
The list shows that just five states account for half of the nation’s top 250 hospitals: California has the most with 32 hospitals, Texas has 28, Florida 26, Pennsylvania 22 and Ohio 19. New York has nine of the top 250 hospitals. .
Thirteen states do not have hospitals on the list: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon and Wyoming.
Just five states account for half of the nation’s top 250 hospitals: California has the most with 32 hospitals, Texas has 28, Florida 26, Pennsylvania 22 and Ohio 19.
AdventHealth Orlando in Florida (pictured) has been in the top 250 for seven consecutive years and received the most Healthgrades awards in the US by 2024.
Healthgrades analyzed more than 4,500 hospitals nationwide. As of 2021, there were more than 6,000 hospitals in the US.
The company did not provide a ranking of the best hospitals or a breakdown of the worst hospitals in the country.
However, notable hospitals included Lancaster General in Pennsylvania, Mayo Clinic Hospitals, and Ascension Alexian Brothers in Illinois.
All three have been in the top 250 for more than 20 years.
There’s also AdventHealth Orlando in Florida, which has been in the top 250 for seven consecutive years and received the most Healthgrades awards in the US by 2024.
Tisch Hospital at NYU Health has also been in the top 250 for six consecutive years and is New York’s No. 1 hospital in eight key specialties, including heart, stomach and bowel care, lung care, and stroke care.
HCA Healthcare has a total of 54 hospitals in 12 states that are among the best in the United States – the most of any healthcare network.
The hospitals that improved the most by 2024 were Altru Hospital in North Dakota, HCA Houston Healthcare Kingwood in Texas and Texas Health Specialty Hospital.
HCA Houston Healthcare Kingwood embarked on a $30 million expansion in 2021 to upgrade its aging infrastructure and equipment.
This included a $3 million catheterization lab, which is used to look at arteries and check how well blood flows to and from the heart.
The hospital also received a $4.2 million hybrid operating room, as well as $1.9 million spent on surgical robots.
To identify the top 250 hospitals in the United States, Healthgrades used more than 45 million Medicare medical claims across hospitals between 2020 and 2022.
Hospitals cannot opt in or out or submit their own data.
Hospitals were rated in 31 groups of conditions and procedures.
The team focused on two key aspects: how many patients die as a result of their condition or procedure and how many experience additional health problems.
They also considered different risk factors that could affect treatment success, such as existing health conditions, age, sex, type of procedure performed, and source of income.
A team of data scientists identified which risk factors are most important in predicting patient outcomes.
They then created a model that predicts the expected outcome for each hospital based on their patients’ conditions and risk factors.
They look at each hospital’s patients individually and compare them to each patient’s average outcome based on their existing conditions and the reason they came to the hospital.
This allows them to generate an expected mortality rate for each hospital and an expected complication rate for each hospital.
The hospitals’ actual results were compared to their predicted results to see how well they performed.
The top 100 hospitals were those that had been in the top 250 for at least the past five years.
Those who made it to the top 50 were those who made it to the top 250 list consecutively for the past seven or eight years.
Dr. Bowman said that among the best-performing hospitals there tends to be a very strong culture of continually wanting to improve.
He told DailyMail.com: ‘Everyone tends to have internal quality teams – people who are always analyzing their data and measuring patient outcomes. They have very good control of their performance.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Dr. Bowman said hospitals with poorer outcomes tend to have staffing and resource issues.
‘They simply don’t have the money or financial resources to have a dedicated quality team.
‘They may be caring for very challenging populations, they may not have enough doctors, they may not have enough nurses, that tends to be something we hear on that end of the spectrum a lot more about staffing levels.
‘We rarely if ever hear about it in the best hospitals. The best hospitals tend to have enough staff to care for their patients. AND [the top hospitals have] Better facilities, more modern facilities, more facilities.’
“The strong stayed strong this year,” he said. “No unexpected changes.”
Dr. Bowman added, “There are a lot of hospitals in the top 50 that you probably have never heard of or expect to be in the top 50.”
“There are a lot of hospitals that you would expect to be in the top 50, simply because of their brand or reputation, but they are not in the top 50.”
That’s because some of the smaller, lesser-known hospitals may be outperforming famous sites, he said.
“There are obviously some excellent hospitals,” Dr. Bowman said. ‘But there are also other hospitals, sometimes academic, sometimes just small community hospitals, that are doing really good work. Their scores are just a little better, or they’re just a little more consistent, measured objectively.’
‘You know the heavyweights who will always be on this list. For me, the most interesting part is the hospital that no one expected, that has been doing a great job and has been doing it for a long, long time. [and are] little recognized.’
Healthgrades also selected the top-ranked hospitals in 32 states in 18 key specialty areas, including acute care and spinal joint replacement surgery.
For specialties, California had the most awards with 90, followed by Texas with 88 and Florida with 86.
For prostate surgery, the best hospitals are in California, Florida, New York and Texas.
Those same states are also home to the best places for heart surgery, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania.
For neurosciences, including stroke, the best hospitals are in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.