The forthcoming U.S. News Best Children’s Hospitals rankings will be shared with participating hospitals under embargo next Thursday, May 27 via the Best Hospitals Dashboard. On June 15, the rankings will be made available to the public on usnews.com/childrenshospitals.
The most significant change to Best Children’s Hospitals this year is the introduction of rankings by state and multi-state region. The goal of these new regional rankings is to help families identify high-quality pediatric centers near home.
Other methodological changes include:
- In scoring surgical complications in orthopedics, use of a funnel plot methodology this year to improve the reliability of hospitals’ scores. Minimum volume thresholds were also removed. As a result of these changes, the maximum score for surgical complications in orthopedics is now 13, compared to last year’s maximum score of 15.
- In orthopedics, the definition of one measure related to best practices was revised, resulting in more hospitals receiving credit for the measure this year than last year.
- For two surgical outcome measures in urology, revision of the funnel plot methodology to eliminate variation in scores between high-volume hospitals with zero complications and lower-volume hospitals with zero complications. In both cases, complications were extremely rare, and differences in performance between these two groups of hospitals were not statistically significant. The maximum score for surgical outcomes was reduced to 15 from 17.
These and other methodology changes are described in detail in the methodology report that will become available next Thursday, May 27, to hospitals in the Best Hospitals Dashboard and will be publicly released alongside the rankings on June 15.
Read more:
- U.S. News Best Children’s Hospitals: usnews.com/childrenshospitals
- U.S. News – Coming Soon: Updated Pediatric Rankings