WHAT´S NEW
Mercy Hospital and Holy Cross Hospital, South Florida's only Catholic hospitals, have been nationally ranked in the top 50 for a specialty area in U.S. News' 2009-10 publication of America's Best Hospitals, accessible online at www.usnews.com/besthospitals and on sale at newsstands Tuesday, July 21. For a consecutive year, Holy Cross was nationally ranked for Orthopedics. Mercy Hospital was nationally ranked for Respiratory Disorders.
Now in its 20th year, the multi-platform 2009-10 America's Best Hospitals guide is the most extensive hospital ranking to-date.
"When the stakes are high, you want the best care you can get for someone close to you," said Avery Comarow, health rankings editor. "These are hospitals that are used to getting the sickest patients."
The 2009-10 America's Best Hospitals guide includes rankings of 174 medical centers nationwide in 16 specialties--with full data available online for another 1,500 unranked hospitals. In addition, the Best Hospitals "Honor Roll" highlights 21 medical centers that were ranked at or near the top in at least six specialties.
The 16 ranked specialties are cancer; diabetes & endocrine disorders; digestive disorders; ear, nose, and throat; geriatric care; gynecology; heart and heart surgery; kidney disorders; neurology and neurosurgery; ophthalmology; orthopedics; psychiatry; rehabilitation; respiratory disorders; rheumatology; and urology.
"It is a great honor for Mercy and Holy Cross to be named among the best in America," said John C. Johnson, President and CEO of Mercy and Holy Cross. "This recognition validates the quality of care provided to patients in these specialties by our physicians and staff."
Of the medical centers ranked in the 2009-10 America's Best Hospitals, 21 earned Honor Roll status, demonstrating excellence and breadth of expertise by ranking at or near the top in at least six specialties.
In addition to the hospitals that appear in one or more specialty rankings in the print magazine, the 2009-10 America's Best Hospitals package includes an online consumer guide where readers can find information on more than 1,500 hospitals that qualified for rankings, but did not score high enough to be ranked (fewer than one-third of the 4,861 U.S. hospitals evaluated did qualify).
The rankings in 12 of the 16 specialties-all but ophthalmology, psychiatry, rehabilitation, and rheumatology-are predominantly driven by hard data. There are four components: reputation, death rate, patient safety (new this year), and care-related factors such as nursing and patient services. In these 12 specialties, hospitals have to pass through several gates to be ranked and considered a Best Hospital:
1. The first gate determines whether a hospital is eligible to be ranked at all by requiring that it must meet any of three conditions: be a teaching hospital; have at least 200 beds; or have at least 100 beds plus at least four out of eight key medical technologies such as current-generation CT scanners and precision radiation therapy.
2. The second gate determines whether a hospital is eligible to be ranked in a particular specialty. To be eligible, the hospital had to either have at least a specified volume of certain procedures and conditions over three years, or had to have been nominated by at least one physician in the last three years of our annual specialist survey.
3. The third gate is whether a hospital does well enough to be ranked, based on its reputation, death rate, patient safety, and factors like nurse staffing and technology.
In the four other specialties-ophthalmology, psychiatry, rehabilitation, and rheumatology - ranking is based solely on nominations from the three most recent physician surveys.
