For the 22nd consecutive year, U.S. News & World Report ranked the Cleveland Clinic as the best U.S. hospital for adult cardiology and heart surgery.
U.S. News evaluated data on U.S. nonfederal community hospitals that treated at least 1,333 Medicare inpatients in 2012, 2013 and 2014. It did not include Veterans Affairs or military hospitals because the federal government did not release data on their performance.
U.S. News gave each of the hospitals a score from 0 to 100 and considered five factors: reputation with specialists (accounting for 24.5 percent of the score), survival (37.5 percent), patient safety (5 percent), public transparency (3 percent) and other care-related indicators (30 percent).
The reputation was based on feedback from board-certified physicians, while survival was based on the number of Medicare inpatients who died within 30 days of admission. Patient safety was assessed based on the success of hospitals at preventing six harmful types of errors or oversights, including injury caused during surgery and major bleeding after surgery.
For the public transparency component, hospitals received credit for publicly reporting quality metrics through the American College of Cardiology and Society of Thoracic Surgery websites. The other care-related indicators included nurse staffing, patient volume and other quality of care measures.
The top 10 hospitals for adult cardiology and heart surgery were:
- Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio (score of 100)
- Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. (96.7)
- New York-Presbyterian University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell in New York (83.2)
- Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston (78.2)
- Duke University Hospital in Durham, N.C. (75.7)
- Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago (75.4)
- Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston (75.2)
- Mount Sinai Hospital in New York (75.0)
- Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore (72.7)
- Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles (71.9)
Executive Editor
Tim Casey joined TriMed Media Group in 2015 as Executive Editor. For the previous four years, he worked as an editor and writer for HMP Communications, primarily focused on covering managed care issues and reporting from medical and health care conferences. He was also a staff reporter at the Sacramento Bee for more than four years covering professional, college and high school sports. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA degree from Georgetown University.