Best Hospitals In Florida: U.S. News 2019 Rankings

FLORIDA — There are 40 Florida hospitals that made it onto the latest list of the nation's top hospitals compiled by U.S. News & World Report. The publication ranked the best hospitals overall as well as by specialty, state and region for 2019–2020.

"We use a number of different measures to assess hospital quality, and we separately assess each hospital in many different specialties and services that hospitals offer," Ben Harder, managing editor and chief of health analysis at U.S. News, told Patch. The 2019 rankings added two new patient-centered measures: patient outcome and patient experience. Hospitals are required by federal mandate to conduct surveys that collect information about a patient's experience, and this data was factored into a hospital's rank.

"Obviously that’s important for patients too because they not only want to get good care and have a good outcome but also feel that what mattered to them was considered and taken into account in the care they got," Harder said.

Honor Roll Hospitals

Hospitals that make the U.S. News & World Report honor roll deliver exceptional treatment across multiple areas of care, according to analysts.

"The honor roll is geared to identifying hospitals that are both exceptionally good at the service they offer and offer a wide breadth of service," Harder said. By definition, he said that means those hospitals are highly ranked across many or most specialties.

While no Florida hospitals made the honor roll, several medical centers ranked nationally for specialty care, including Bascom Palmer Eye Institute-Anne Bates Leach Eye Hospital in Miami, which is the number-one place in the nation to go for ophthalmology, according to U.S. News & World Report.

These hospitals made the honor roll:

• Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota (1)
• Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (2)
• Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore (3)
• Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland (4)
• New York-Presbyterian Hospital of Columbia and Cornell, New York (5)
• UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles (6)
• UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco (7)
• Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles (8)
• NYU Langone Hospitals, New York (9)
• Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago (10)
• University of Michigan Hospitals-Michigan Medicine, Ann Arbor (11)
• Stanford Health Care-Stanford Hospital, Palo Alto, California (12)
• Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston (13)
• Mount Sinai Hospital, New York (14)
• UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside, Pittsburgh (15)
• Keck Hospital of USC, Los Angeles (16)
• University of Wisconsin Hospitals, Madison, Wisconsin (17)
• Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Presbyterian, Philadelphia (tie) (18)
• Mayo Clinic-Phoenix, Phoenix (tie) (18)
• Houston Methodist Hospital, Houston (tie) (20)
• Yale New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut (tie) (20)

Florida Hospital Rankings

"The vast majority of patients don’t need a top-ranked hospital for complex specialty care and their needs may be very well met by a best regional hospital that can offer a breadth of services relevant to their care," Harder said.

In Florida, 40 met the standards for best hospitals, which means they had high performance delivering a range of care. Several were nationally ranked in specialty areas.

Hospitals were ranked across 12 specialties: cancer; cardiology and heart surgery; diabetes and endocrinology; ear, nose and throat; gastroenterology and GI surgery; geriatrics; gynecology; nephrology; neurology and neurosurgery; orthopedics; pulmonology and lung surgery; and urology.

Hospitals that rank highly in specialty care are often regional or national referral centers, somewhere a patient may go to get a second opinion, even traveling across several states. The rankings for regional hospitals don’t require that these centers are strong in referral care because many patients don’t need that level of care. The local rankings are geared towards identifying hospitals that are good at a range of services.

“Most patients can find the care they need in their community or near their community, in their insurance network,” Harder said.

Here are the top 10 in Florida:

• AdventHealth Orlando, Orlando
  • Nationally ranked in seven specialties: No. 12 in diabetes and endocrinology; No. 18 in gastroenterology and GI surgery; No. 19 in nephrology; No. 20 in urology; No. 26 in gynecology; No. 39 in geriatrics; and No. 39 in neurology and neurosurgery
  • Nationally ranked in one children's specialty: No. 31 in neonatology
• UF Health Shands Hospital, Gainesville
  • Nationally ranked in three specialties: No. 31 in geriatrics; No. 41 in neurology and neurosurgery; and No. 48 in urology
• Mayo Clinic-Jacksonville, Jacksonville
• Tampa General Hospital, Tampa
  • Nationally ranked in five specialties: No. 16 in orthopedics; No. 22 in gastroenterology and GI surgery; No. 30 in diabetes and endocrinology; No. 30 in nephrology; and No. 44 in urology
• Baptist Medical Center, Jacksonville
  • Nationally ranked in two pediatric specialties: No. 48 in pediatric neurology and neurosurgery; and No. 50 in pediatric cancer
• Cleveland Clinic Florida, Weston
  • Nationally ranked No. 17 in gastroenterology and GI surgery
• Baptist Hospital of Miami, Miami
  • Nationally ranked No. 46 in orthopedics
• Sarasota Memorial Hospital, Sarasota
• Morton Plant Hospital, Clearwater
• University of Miami Hospital and Clinics-UHealth Tower, Miami

See the full list of best hospitals in Florida from U.S. News & World Report, which also had regional "best hospitals" lists for the Jacksonville, Lakeland, Miami, Orlando and Tampa metro areas as well as a list of the best children's hospitals in Florida.

Patient-Centered Measures

Two patient-centered measures were part of the survey this year for the U.S. News Best Hospitals list. Data from a federally mandated survey was used to assess this measure, according to U.S. News. The survey covers topics like how good doctors and nurses were at communicating with patients and how well a patient understood how to take care of themselves after leaving the hospital.

Analysts looked at whether patients went home or needed more care at a rehab facility or a different hospital after leaving.

"That’s an important outcome for patients," Harder said. "Patients do want to be home recovering and spending time with their families."

To ensure the rankings do not penalize those that admit sicker patients, the methodology adjusts for how sick a patient was when admitted.

Methodology

U.S. News & World Report said the 2019-20 rankings evaluated nearly every community hospital in America.

Only 165 hospitals out of more than 4,500 were ranked in one specialty, while 569 hospitals were ranked among the best regional hospitals.

A hospital was ranked regionally based on its performance in delivering complex and common care, U.S. News says. The rankings are jointly produced by U.S. News and RTI International, a North Carolina-based research organization.

Read the full U.S. News best hospitals methodology.

— By Patch editors Feroze Dhanoa and Elizabeth Janney