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Magazine Reveals 'Best Hospitals' List

July 11, 2008 -- If you are staring down a serious disease, where would you go for the best medical treatment and care?

U.S. News & World Report is out with its “best hospitals” list, and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore has the highest ranking.

An independent research firm looked at data on 5,453 medical centers to come up with this year’s specialty rankings. Only 170 hospitals were ranked in one or more specialties and just 19 of those reached “honor roll” status.

Some hospitals received the same rank; they are listed together.

Best U.S. Hospitals

Here are the 19 hospitals making the U.S. News & World Report honor roll:

• Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore
• Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.
• Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles
• Cleveland Clinic
• Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston
• New York-Presbyterian University Hospitals of Columbia and Cornell
• University of California, San Francisco Medical Center
• Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston and Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C.
• Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle
• Barnes-Jewish Hospital/Washington University, St. Louis
• University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers, Ann Arbor
• UPMC-University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
• Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville
• Stanford Hospital and Clinics, Stanford, Calif.
• University of Chicago Medical Center
• Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles
• Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Conn.

The above hospitals had to rank high in at list six specialty areas including:

• Cancer care
• Ear, nose, and throat
• Gastrointestinal disorders
• Geriatric care
• Gynecology
• Heart and heart surgery

How Hospitals Made the Grade

U.S. News & World Report says the hospitals were judged not only on how good the routine care is, but also on whether they offer “outstanding” care and how well they handle “difficult cases across an entire specialty.”

The magazine did not look at veterans' or military hospitals because data were not available for them.

You can check the scores online at health.usnews.com/sections/health/best-hospitals.