Residency

Being involved in all the hospital drama and knowledge, I thought that it would be nice to put this list of the 17 top ranked hospitals.  Not neccessarily to pursue, but to recognize what makes them the best of the best.

The rankings were produced for U.S. News by RTI International, a leading research organization based in Research Triangle Park, N.C. Be sure to add your own fact-gathering to ours; no hospital is best for every patient.

Rank	Hospital	Points	Specialties
1	Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore	30	15
2	Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston	29	15
3	Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.	28	15
4	Cleveland Clinic	26	13
5	Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles	25	14
6	New York-Presbyterian University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell, N.Y.	22	12
7	UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco	20	11
8	Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston	18	12
9	Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C.	18	10
10	Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia	17	12
11	Barnes-Jewish Hospital/Washington University, St. Louis	16	11
12	UPMC-University of Pittsburgh Medical Center	14	8
13	University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle	13	9
14	University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers, Ann Arbor	10	6
14	Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville	10	6
16	Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York	8	6
17	Stanford Hospital and Clinics, Stanford, Calif.	7	6

* 2 points for scores 4 or more standard deviations above the mean, 1 point for scores from 3 to 4 standard deviations above the mean.

Best Hospitals 2011-12: the Methodology

Here is how U.S. News selected the 140 out of 4,825 U.S. hospitals that ranked in one or more of our 16 specialties.

Our intent when we published the first Best Hospitals annual rankings in 1990 was to help people who find themselves in need of unusually skilled inpatient care, and that mission hasn't changed in Year 22. The Best Hospitals rankings judge medical centers on their competence in exactly such high-stakes situations. For example, a hospital ranked in cardiology and heart surgery—one of 16 specialties in which centers were evaluated—likely has the expertise and experience to replace a faulty heart valve in a man in his 90s. Most hospitals would decline to perform major surgery on elderly patients, as they should if they aren't up to speed on the special techniques and precautions required and don't see many such patients. A ranked hospital in gastroenterology can probably offer the most appropriate care to a patient whose inflammatory bowel disease flares up. At hospitals ranked in neurology and neurosurgery, surgeons face more spinal tumors in a couple of weeks than most community hospitals see in a year.

By contrast, other hospital ratings and rankings for the most part examine how well hospitals treat relatively unthreatening conditions or perform fairly routine procedures, such as hernia repair and uncomplicated heart bypass surgery. The majority of hospital patients need such ordinary care, so for them that approach to evaluating hospitals works fine. But it falls short for patients who are especially at risk because of age, physical condition, infirmities, or the challenging nature of the surgery or other care they need.

A good way to determine how well a hospital deals with a medical challenge is to evaluate its performance across a range of challenges within the specialty. U.S. News ranks hospitals in 16 different specialties, from cancer to urology. This year, only 140 of the 4,825 hospitals that we evaluated performed well enough to rank in even one specialty. And of the 140, just 17 qualified for a spot on the Honor Roll by ranking at or near the top in six or more specialties.