These Are Virginia's Best Hospitals: U.S. News 2019 Rankings

VIRGINIA — U.S. News & World Report has released its latest list of the nation's top hospitals. In Virginia, no hospitals made the honor roll, and 15 were on the state's best hospitals list.

The hospital rankings for 2019-20 include the honor roll, top-ranked hospitals in 12 specialty categories and top-ranked hospitals by state and metro region.

"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.

"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 those hospitals are highly ranked across many or most specialties.

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)

Virginia Hospitals Ranked

"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 Virginia, 15 met the U.S. News standards for best hospitals. Several were nationally ranked in certain specialty areas of care.

Hospitals were ranked across a dozen 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 toward 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 15 hospitals in Virginia, according to U.S. News:

• University of Virginia Medical Center, Charlottesville
  • Nationally ranked in three specialties: No. 15 in ear, nose and throat; No. 26 in cancer; and No. 35 in gastroenterology and GI surgery
  • Nationally ranked among top 50 hospitals in eight children's specialties
• Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, Norfolk
  • Nationally ranked No. 43 in ear, nose and throat
• Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, Roanoke
• Inova Fairfax Hospital, Falls Church
  • Nationally ranked No. 13 in gynecology
• VCU Medical Center, Richmond
• Bon Secours St. Mary's Hospital, Richmond
• Virginia Hospital Center, Arlington
• Centra Lynchburg General Hospital, Lynchburg
• Inova Alexandria Hospital, Alexandria
• Mary Washington Hospital, Fredericksburg
• Chippenham Hospital, Richmond
• Inova Fair Oaks Hospital, Fairfax
• Winchester Medical Center, Winchester
• Augusta Health-Fishersville, Fisherville
• Sentara Leigh Hospital, Norfolk

See the list of best hospitals in Virginia from U.S. News & World Report as well as regional "best hospitals" lists for the Richmond and Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News metro areas and Washington, D.C. There is a separate list for best children's hospitals in Virginia.

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 incorporated into the scoring for each hospital, according to U.S. News. The survey covers topics like how good doctors and nurses were at communicating with patients and how well patients understood what they needed to do to take care of themselves after leaving the hospital.

Analysts looked at whether patients went home or required 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