What Makes a ‘Best’ Hospital? Our Rankings Guru Answers.

cision Points sat down with Ben Harder, managing editor and chief of health analysis at U.S. News, to get his insights on how we make our lists and what’s going on in the nation’s hospital systems.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What makes a good, or great, hospital?

We evaluate hospital performance in many different services, because a patient doesn’t just need a hospital. They need a hospital for a particular condition or a particular surgery. Our goal is to answer the question not just ‘which hospitals are good or great,’ but ‘which hospitals are good and what are they good at?’

We publish over three dozen evaluations of every hospital for these different services and specialties. The right hospital to go to for cancer may be different from the right hospital to go to for a knee replacement.

So how do you determine that?

We look at an incredible trove of data that we have access to thanks to the fact that the U.S. taxpayers pay for much of the health care that’s provided in this country through the Medicare program, Medicare Advantage and Medicaid programs, among others. We have a record of every hospitalization that’s occurred for a Medicare beneficiary, and we have a great deal of information in that record.

We look at what the patient was admitted for, what care they received, what conditions they had when they arrived, what happened to them after they were discharged. By looking at that across tens of millions of encounters between a patient and a hospital, we get a very rich picture of which hospitals are good and what they’re good at.

We publish over three dozen evaluations of every hospital for these different services and specialties. The right hospital to go to for cancer may be different from the right hospital to go to for a knee replacement.

So how do you determine that?

We look at an incredible trove of data that we have access to thanks to the fact that the U.S. taxpayers pay for much of the health care that’s provided in this country through the Medicare program, Medicare Advantage and Medicaid programs, among others. We have a record of every hospitalization that’s occurred for a Medicare beneficiary, and we have a great deal of information in that record.

We look at what the patient was admitted for, what care they received, what conditions they had when they arrived, what happened to them after they were discharged. By looking at that across tens of millions of encounters between a patient and a hospital, we get a very rich picture of which hospitals are good and what they’re good at.

What are some interesting trends that you’re seeing in American hospitals?

One of them is the embrace of outpatient care, particularly outpatient surgery. Many health systems are partnering with surgery centers and specialty practices that provide surgical care to find less expensive settings to provide some of that care in.

Certainly, this has been an ongoing trend, but I think it’s accelerating. Hip replacements, knee replacements, many other lower acuity procedures are shifting from the hospital setting to ambulatory centers, where the cost can be reduced. It may or may not reduce patient out-of-pocket costs, depending on the nature of their insurance plan. But it is, at least in theory, going to lower the total cost of care across the health system.

Source: https://www.usnews.com/news/u-s-news-decision-points/articles/2025-08-01/what-makes-a-best-hospital-our-expert-answers