STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — U.S. News & World Report recently evaluated 205 hospitals in New York, with 29 meeting high standards and being recognized as Best Regional Hospitals.
The media outlet ranked hospitals in the Albany, Buffalo, New York City, Poughkeepsie-Newburgh and Rochester metro areas.
Based on the research, the top hospitals in New York are:
— NYU Langone Hospitals
— New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia and Cornell
— Mount Sinai Hospital
— North Shore University Hospital at Northwell Health
The 15 Best Hospitals‘ national specialty rankings are updated annually. Rankings in 12 of the 15 rely largely on objective data. Each specialty showcases the 50 top-scoring hospitals, based primarily on survival rates for particularly challenging patients, patient experience and other measures of performance that can be assessed using hard data. All evaluated hospitals and their results, including overall scores, are displayed online, but rankings are only displayed for the top 50.
Staten Island University Hospital was ranked 13th overall in the state, highlighting its commitment to providing exceptional health-care services to the community.
And for the third consecutive year, Richmond University Medical Center was named a “High Performing Hospital” by U.S. News & World Report for its care of patients experiencing congestive heart failure.
Procedure rankings, speciality rankings
The rankings are broken into two subcomponents – specialty rankings and procedure and condition ratings.
The Best Hospitals specialty rankings are meant for patients with life-threatening or rare conditions who need a hospital that excels in treating complex, high-risk cases. These rankings are helpful if you’re looking for information about a rare condition or difficult diagnosis that isn’t treated at many facilities.
Hospitals are ranked from 1 to 50 in each specialty, with hospitals not in the top 50 but still in the top 10% of all rated hospitals receiving a designation of “high performing.”
The Best Hospitals procedure and condition ratings focus on specific and more commonly required individual procedures and conditions, such as hip replacement and heart failure.
The goal is to evaluate how well hospitals perform in each procedure or condition with the full range of patients.
Because the procedures and conditions evaluated are performed at many more hospitals than the specialties, the evaluations produce ratings rather than numerical rankings. Hospitals that treat enough patients to be evaluated are rated one of three ways for each procedure or condition: high-performing, average or below average.
Checking the U.S. News Best Hospitals specialty rankings in whichever of the 15 specialties applies to you is in order if your care calls for special expertise or if age, physical ailments or a chronic condition could add a layer of risk.
Specialties ranked
U.S. News evaluates 15 specialty areas of care. In 12 of the specialty areas, rankings are derived from data sources, such as Medicare.
The rankings name the top 50 hospitals for complex care in each of the 12 data-driven specialties and almost a dozen in each of the three expert opinion-based specialties.
The specialties are:
— Cancer
— Cardiology, heart & vascular surgery
— Diabetes & endocrinology
— Ear, nose & throat
— Gastroenterology & GI surgery
— Geriatrics
— Obstetrics and gynecology
— Neurology and neurosurgery
— Orthopedics
— Pulmonology & lung surgery
— Rehabilitation
— Urology
In the remaining three specialties – Ophthalmology, Psychiatry and Rheumatology – ranking is determined entirely by expert opinion, based on responses from three years of surveys of physician specialists who were asked to name the hospitals to which they would be inclined to refer their sickest patients.