Association Between Newsweek’s Global Hospital Ranking and Patient Outcomes in the USA

Excerpt

Although several hospital rankings have been available in the USA,^{1, 2} there has not been a “global” hospital ranking that assesses hospitals around the world. Recently, Newsweek partnered with a global market research company Statista and ranked the top 1000 hospitals worldwide, including both the USA and foreign hospitals. The ranking was based on three factors: recommendations from peers (55%), patient experience (15%), and quality indicators (e.g., hygiene and patient safety measures, number of patients per doctor/nurse) (30%).³ While informative, this ranking did not account for direct measures of patient outcomes, and it relied heavily on recommendations from peers, despite limited evidence supporting the accuracy of peer evaluations about the quality of hospitals.⁴ To address this issue, we investigated whether the Newsweek’s global hospital ranking of US hospitals was associated with risk-adjusted patient outcomes. …