Health & Fitness

Hackensack Medical Ranked Among Best NJ Hospitals By U.S. News

The hospital got a 'high performing' designation for cancer, urology, and heart bypass surgery, and other specialty rankings.

BERGEN COUNTY, NJ — Hackensack University Medical Center was ranked No. 2 on a new list of the best hospitals in New Jersey by U.S. News & World Report.

HUMC was "high performing" in several specialty categories: Cancer, geriatrics, neurology, orthopedics, heart bypass surgery, and urology.

The hospital also received a "high performing" designation in several surgical disciplines, including hip and knee replacement, lung cancer, and neurosurgery.

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"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. "In each of those areas, we are now assessing how successful a hospital is at sending patients home."

The rankings now look at whether after receiving care, patients end up going home or require further care at a rehab facility or even at a different hospital.

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The survey also 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.

"So that patient experience dimension is one that we added to our specialty rankings this year, and 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.

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