America’s Best Hospitals for 2024 Revealed: California, Texas, Florida and OHIO are Home to the Nation’s Best Facilities – So Where Does YOUR State Stand?
The best hospitals for 2024 in the US have been revealed in a new report.
Healthgrades, the leading site for Americans to choose doctors and hospitals, ranked the 250 best-performing hospitals based on patient data from 2020 to 2022.
According to the analysis, if all U.S. hospitals had performed at the same level as the top 250, potentially 178,402 lives could have been saved.
Patients seen at a hospital ranked in the top 250 have a 30 percent lower risk of death, Dr. Brad Bowman, chief medical officer and head of data science at Healthgrades, told DailyMail.com.
The list shows that just five states make up half of the nation’s 250 largest hospitals: California has the most with 32 hospitals, Texas has 28, Florida 26, Pennsylvania 22 and Ohio 19. New York has nine of the best 250 hospitals. .
Thirteen states have no hospitals on the list: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon and Wyoming.
Just five states make up half of the nation’s 250 largest hospitals: California has the most with 32 hospitals, Texas has 28, Florida 26, Pennsylvania 22 and Ohio 19.
AdventHealth Orlando in Florida (pictured) has been in the top 250 for seven years in a row and received the most Healthgrades awards in the US for 2024
Healthgrades analyzed more than 4,500 hospitals across the country. In 2021, there were more than 6,000 hospitals in the US.
The company did not provide a ranking of the best hospitals or an overview of the worst hospitals in the country.
However, notable hospitals included Lancaster General in Pennsylvania, Mayo Clinic Hospitals and Ascension Alexian Brothers in Illinois.
All three have been in the top 250 for more than 20 years.
There was also AdventHealth Orlando in Florida, which has been in the top 250 for seven years in a row and received the most Healthgrades awards in the US for 2024.
NYU Health’s Tisch Hospital has also been ranked in the top 250 for six consecutive years and is New York’s number one hospital for eight major specialties, including cardiac, gastrointestinal, pulmonary and stroke care.
HCA Healthcare has a total of 54 hospitals across 12 states that are among the best in America – the highest of any healthcare network.
The most improved hospitals for 2024 were Altru Hospital in North Dakota, HCA Houston Healthcare Kingwood in Texas and Texas Health Specialty Hospital.
Healthgrades also selected the top-rated hospitals in 32 states in 18 key specialty areas, including critical care and joint replacement spine surgery. For specialties, California had the most awards with 90, followed by Texas with 88 and Florida with 86
HCA Houston Healthcare Kingwood embarked on a $30 million expansion in 2021 to upgrade infrastructure and aging equipment.
This included a $3 million catheter laboratory, which is used to view the arteries and check how well blood flows to and from the heart.
The hospital also received a $4.2 million hybrid operating room, as well as $1.9 million spent on surgical robots.
To identify America’s top 250 hospitals, Healthgrades used more than 45 million hospital Medicare claims from 2020 to 2022.
Hospitals cannot register or deregister or submit their own data.
The hospitals were assessed in 31 condition and procedure groups.
The team focused on two key aspects: how many patients die as a result of their condition or procedure and how many experience additional health problems.
They also took into account several risk factors that could affect the success of treatment, such as existing health conditions, age, gender, the type of procedure performed and the source of admission.
A team of data scientists has identified which risk factors are most important in predicting patient outcomes.
They then created a model that predicts the expected outcome for each hospital based on their patients’ conditions and risk factors.
They look at each hospital’s patients individually and compare them to the average outcome for each patient based on their existing conditions and why they came to the hospital.
This allows them to generate an expected mortality rate for each hospital and an expected complication rate for each hospital.
The hospitals’ actual results were compared to the predicted results to see how well they performed.
The top 100 hospitals were those that had been in the top 250 for at least the past five years.
Those who made the top 50 were those who made the top 250 list consecutively for the past seven to eight years.
Dr. Bowman said that among the top-performing hospitals there is often a very strong culture of continuous improvement.
He told DailyMail.com: ‘They usually all have internal quality teams – people who are always looking at their data and measuring patient outcomes. They have a very good insight into how they perform.’
On the other end of the spectrum, Dr. Bowman said the worst-performing hospitals often have staffing and resource issues.
‘They simply don’t have the money and financial resources to have a dedicated quality team.
“Maybe they’re serving very challenging populations, maybe they don’t have enough physicians, maybe they don’t have enough nurses, that’s something we hear a lot more on that end of the spectrum about staffing levels.
‘We rarely or never hear that from the top hospitals. The top hospitals usually have enough staff to care for their patients. And (the top hospitals have) better facilities, more modern facilities, more facilities.”
“The strong stayed strong this year,” he said. ‘No unexpected developments.’
Dr. Bowman added, “There are a lot of hospitals in the top 50 that you probably haven’t heard of or expect to be in the top 50.”
“There are many hospitals that you would expect to be in the top 50 just because of brand or reputation, but they are not in the top 50.”
This is because some of the smaller, lesser-known hospitals may perform better than the well-known locations, he said.
“There are obviously some great hospitals out there,” Dr. Bowman said. ‘But there are also other hospitals, sometimes academic, sometimes small community hospitals, that are simply doing very well. Their scores are slightly better, or they are slightly more consistent, measured objectively.’
“You know the heavy hitters that will always be on this list. To me, the most interesting part is the hospital that no one ever expected, that does great work and has been doing great for a long time, (and is not recognized).”
Healthgrades also selected the top-rated hospitals in 32 states in 18 key specialty areas, including critical care and joint replacement spine surgery.
For specialties, California had the most awards with 90, followed by Texas with 88 and Florida with 86.
For prostate surgery, the best hospitals are in California, Florida, New York and Texas.
Those same states are also home to the best places for heart surgery, in addition to Michigan and Pennsylvania.
For neuroscience, including stroke, the best hospitals are in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.