US News & World Report ranks Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara among best hospitals in state, region, for specialty care

Kaiser Permanente’s Santa Clara Medical Center has been ranked 27th in the state - and 3rd in the San Jose Metro Area - in the U.S. News & World Report annual report on hospitals that excel in treating the most complex cases.
The magazine noted Santa Clara was high performing in urology. The Santa Clara Medical Center was ranked last May as “high performing” in heart bypass surgery, knee replacement and hip replacement procedures, in the U.S. News Best Hospital ratings for common care
In rankings by state and metro area, U.S. News recognized hospitals that perform nearly at the level of their nationally ranked peers in one or more specialties, as well as hospitals that excel in multiple common procedures and conditions. The hospitals were evaluated and ranked overall for specialties such as cancer, gastroenterology and GI surgery, geriatrics, gynecology, neurology and neurosurgery, orthopedics, pulmonology and urology.
Six other Kaiser Permanente hospitals in Northern California -- Manteca, Oakland, Antioch, Santa Rosa, South Sacramento and South San Francisco - were ranked best overall in the state or their respective regions for one or more specialties. Nationally, 20 Kaiser Permanente hospitals were rated high performing in one or more specialties.
In addition, Kaiser Permanente hospitals in San Francisco and Sacramento are among the country’s top 50 hospitals for certain types of specialty care, according to the U.S. News & World Report annual report on Best Hospitals for Specialty Care.
San Francisco Medical Center ranked 45th in the country for cardiology and heart surgery. It was ranked 12th in California and third in San Francisco for one or more specialties. It received “high performing” rankings for cancer, gastroenterology and GI surgery, geriatrics, gynecology, neurology and neurosurgery, pulmonology and urology.
Sacramento Medical Center was ranked 50th in the country for gynecology. It was ranked 17th in the state and second in the Sacramento metro area.
This is the 26th year that U.S. News has evaluated hospitals in 16 adult specialties and ranked the top 50 in most of the specialties. Less than three percent of the nearly 5,000 hospitals that were analyzed for Best Hospitals 2015-16 were nationally ranked in even one specialty. The report also analyzed and rated facilities in most states and in major metropolitan regions (all U.S. regions with at least 500,000 in population).

“Every day, the 700 physicians and thousands of nurses at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara strive to provide the best care for our members, and this honor is a tribute to all of them,” said Dr. Susan Smarr, Physician-in-Chief of the Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Medical Center.
U.S. News publishes Best Hospitals to help guide patients who need a high level of care because they face particularly difficult surgery, a challenging condition or extra risk because of age or multiple health problems. Objective measures such as patient survival and safety data, adequacy of nurse staffing and other data largely determined the rankings in most specialties.
The specialty rankings and data were produced for U.S. News by RTI International, a leading research organization based in Research Triangle Park, N.C. U.S. News used the same data, as well as the new Best Hospitals for Common Care ratings, first published in May, to produce the state and metro rankings.
The rankings are freely available at http://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals and will appear in the U.S. News “Best Hospitals 2016” guidebook, available in August from the U.S. News Store.