With a population of 311.6 million inhabitants and about 171 million visitors annually, the United States in its infrastructure needs to be prepared to accommodate all these people. According to the OECD website, 88% of the country's population considers themselves in good health and without the need for medical treatment, and the country's life expectancy is an average of 79 years.
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted the importance of providing excellent medical care so that lives are not lost due to a simple lack of supplies or space. To help maintain the quality of medical care in hospitals, the USA has evaluated and rewarded its hospitals for over 30 years, divided into two main areas - by specialties, and by procedures and conditions, the best of which are listed in the "Honor Roll" award.
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One of the purposes of the Honor Roll is to help patients, directing, in consultation with their doctors, the choice of the best hospital for the patient's health care. The best hospitals classified in the specialty category are generally those that deal with extreme life-threatening situations or very rare conditions. This ranking helps patients who are looking for specialties or information about diseases that are difficult to diagnose, and which end up not being treated in any hospital.
Hospitals are ranked from 1 to 50 in each specialty, and it should be remembered that even the hospitals at the end of the list are still considered the best hospitals in the country, simply because they are on the list, as the listing evaluation criteria are extremely strict and only hospitals that regularly deal with complex cases and have the necessary experience to provide high-quality care manage to be named and pass.
The best hospitals in the procedures and conditions category focus on everyday and common treatments, or treatments specific to a specialty but which are already considered routines, such as hip replacement or cardiac surgery. The objective here is to assess how well hospitals perform each procedure and its conditions, not just in the most difficult cases but in general procedures and all patients.
Because procedures and conditions are evaluated and performed in many more hospitals than the specialty category, the evaluation results in classification rather than a numerical position, procedures and conditions can be rated high, average, or below-average performance.
Depending on the patient's situation, it is often better to be taken to a hospital classified as "average" than to a high-performance one due to location or cost.
The data for the 2021/22 Honor Roll listing is dated back to before the COVID-19 pandemic, and therefore does not show the impact it had on the hospitals on the listing.
For this year's Honor Roll, more than 4,750 hospitals were evaluated within the categories of specialties and procedures, and conditions. Of those evaluated, 175 hospitals were ranked in at least one of the specialties, and 531 hospitals were ranked as the best in the region or state.
Best Hospitals of Honor Roll 2021-22
1. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota.
3. UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles.
4. Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore.
5. Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.
6. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles.
7. New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia and Cornell, New York.
8. NYU Langone Hospitals, New York.
9. UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco.
10. Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago.
11. University of Michigan Hospitals-Michigan Medicine, Ann Arbor.
12. Stanford Health Care-Stanford Hospital, Stanford, California.
13. Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Presbyterian, Philadelphia.
14. Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston.
16. Houston Methodist Hospital.
17. (tie) Barnes-Jewish Hospital, St. Louis.
17. (tie) Mount Sinai Hospital, New York.
19. Rush University Medical Center, Chicago.
20. Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville.
Anyway, it is worth remembering that this list is not mandatory, and should be taken into consideration by a health professional so that the best decision can be made regarding the patient's treatment location.
Sources: OECD Better Life Index - HealthNews FAQ