The Best Hospital in Every State

Navigating the health care system can be daunting. But Newsweek's latest ranking aims to ease some of the stress and anxiety that comes from choosing the best hospital for you or a loved one.

A few weeks ago, Newsweek, in partnership with Statista, published a ranking of America's best-in-state hospitals for 2024. The list includes 600 of the country's leading hospitals in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to help our readers find the most helpful care in their locale.

The University of Michigan Hospitals-Michigan Medicine in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was ranked the top hospital in the state of Michigan. Hospital President Dr. David Miller credits this honor to his incredible staff, who works around the clock to provide care in their community.

"We're thrilled to be recognized on this list of best hospitals and I think in a complex time in healthcare, anytime that there's external recognition and validation of the incredible commitment and expertise that our teams bring forward every day," he told Newsweek. "It reinforces the work that we're doing to care for our patients and to provide the best patient experience. Our relentless focus here at Michigan Medicine is around patient-centered, high-quality, safe and expert care, and that also reflects the innovative care delivery models that are present at our academic medical center."

For this ranking, the 25 states with the highest number of hospitals were included in the survey. Those states are: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin.

The remaining states were divided into four regions for the survey—Northeast, Midwest, West and South.

Here are the top hospitals in each state and Washington, D.C.:

• Alabama: UAB Hospital in Birmingham
• Alaska: Fairbanks Memorial Hospital in Fairbanks
• Arizona: Mayo Clinic in Phoenix
• Arkansas: Mercy Hospital Northwest Arkansas in Rogers
• California: UCLA Health – Ronald Reagan Medical Center in Los Angeles
• Colorado: University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora
• Connecticut: Yale New Haven Hospital in New Haven
• Delaware: Christiana Hospital in Newark
• District of Columbia: MedStar Georgetown University Hospital
• Florida: Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville
• Georgia: Emory University Hospital in Atlanta
• Hawaii: The Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu
• Idaho: St. Luke's Boise Medical Center in Boise
• Illinois: Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago
• Indiana: Indiana University Health West Hospital in Avon
• Iowa: University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City
• Kansas: University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City
• Kentucky: University of Kentucky - Albert B. Chandler Hospital in Lexington
• Louisiana: Willis Knighton Medical Center in Shreveport
• Maine: Maine Medical Center in Portland
• Maryland: The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore
• Massachusetts: Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston
• Michigan: University of Michigan Hospitals - Michigan Medicine in Ann Arbor
• Minnesota: Mayo Clinic in Rochester
• Mississippi: Baptist Memorial Hospital Union Country in New Albany
• Missouri: Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis
• Montana: St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula
• Nebraska: Nebraska Medicine - Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha
• Nevada: St. Mary's Regional Medical Center in Reno
• New Hampshire: Dartmouth - Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon
• New Jersey: Morristown Medical Center in Morristown
• New Mexico: Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque
• New York: The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City
• North Carolina: Duke University Hospital in Durham
• North Dakota: Sanford Medical Center Bismarck in Bismarck
• Ohio: Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland
• Oklahoma: St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa
• Oregon: OHSU Hospital in Portland
• Pennsylvania: Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania - Penn Presbyterian in Philadelphia
• Rhode Island: Rhode Island Hospital in Providence
• South Carolina: MUSC Health - University Medical Center in Charleston
• South Dakota: Sanford USD Medical Center in Sioux Falls
• Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville
• Texas: Houston Methodist Hospital in Houston
• Utah: University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City
• Vermont: The University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington
• Virginia: University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville
• Washington: University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle
• West Virginia: WVU Medicine in Morgantown
• Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison
• Wyoming: St. John's Health in Jackson

From June to July 2023, Statista conducted an online survey featuring tens of thousands of healthcare professionals, including doctors and hospital managers.

The score each hospital received was broken down into four main categories— recommendations from peers, patient experience, hospital quality metrics and Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) implementations.

Dr. Marc Boom, the president and CEO of Houston Methodist in Texas, said that while the recognition for the facility's work is nice, he tells his staff to keep focusing on the fundamentals: "unparalleled safety, quality service and innovation."

"We tell our teams [to] focus on the basics, get the things done, put the patient at the center of everything," he told Newsweek. "And every so often something like this award will come up and we'll take a moment we'll celebrate and then we'll put our heads back down and start working again."

The participants in the survey were asked to recommend leading hospitals in their state based on quality of care, patient counseling and accommodations and amenities. Participants could not recommend the hospitals that employed them.

A score was then assigned to each hospital based on the total number of state and national recommendations.

This portion of the methodology accounted for 40 percent of the reputation score—32.5 percent from in-state recommendations and 7.5 percent from out-of-state recommendations.

Hospital quality metrics were also considered with a 40 percent weight to the overall score.

The survey took into account mortality, safety, readmission, experience and timely and effective care based on data from Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Hospital accreditation data from the Joint Commission (TJC) was also taken into account.

At Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, an artificial intelligence algorithm has recently been implemented to improve care and patient experience.

The program can alert the staff if a patient will get sick in the next six to 12 hours so that the hospital can send in an expert to evaluate the patient, according to hospital president Dr. David Reich. The algorithm allows physicians to determine the level of care each patient requires, whether it's aggressive curative treatment or more deescalated quality of life care.

The Mount Sinai algorithm can also predict when patients might have a health issue. AI can also be used to detect health issues like malnutrition, something Reich calls a "hidden epidemic" within hospitals. Newsweek recently ranked Mount Sinai the fifth-best smart hospital in the world.

Reich said there is a patient experience team that uses what the AI found and then visits patients to check in, be proactive and "show a little human kindness, care and concern."

To analyze patient experience, the Newsweek/Statista survey used publicly available data from Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to consider the cleanliness and quietness of hospitals, communication of the nurses and doctors, staff responsiveness, care transition, medicine communication and discharge information. This accounted for 17.5 percent of the score.

Hospitals with "outstanding performance" inpatient experience were given additional recognition with a patient satisfaction award.

The PROM score comes from questionnaires completed by patients to measure their perception of their functional well-being and quality of life, according to Statista.

The voluntary PROMs survey determined "the status quo of PROMs implementation, audits and reporting of the data and whether the PROMs data is used to optimize the care process and support therapeutic decisions in real-time," according to the ranking's methodology.

In St. Louis, Missouri, Barnes-Jewish Hospital is dedicated to ensuring patients are comfortable.

Unlike many large hospitals, Barnes Jewish Hospital has many patients in private or semi-private rooms and is working toward having an all-private experience, hospital President Dr. John Lynch told Newsweek. The facility is also hardwiring best practices that include hourly rounds to patients and bedside shift reports so patients and their families are hearing the same information and care plan and can ask any questions, facilitating more conversations with consultants, therapists and the primary care team.

The hospital, in conjunction with Washington University, is also working on ways to improve patient experience, including developing white noise machines and quiet night kits complete with eye masks and ear plugs to limit nighttime disturbances.

"At scale, that can be challenging but our team members know how important it is to be checking in on their patients regularly, to be speaking with one voice about the plan with our team members and our patients, and trying some of these innovative approaches and having a better patient experience, particularly after hours," Lynch said.

This ranking aims to show people across the country that they can get quality medical treatment in their own backyard. Each of these hospitals is committed to providing access to care to help address specific healthcare problems affecting members of their community.

Mount Sinai, located in the heart of East Harlem, was built in the 1850s to meet the needs of the Jewish immigrants living in the area, Dr. Reich said. As the demographics of the neighborhood have changed over the decades, the hospital continues to provide medical assistance to those who otherwise would not be able to receive care. This includes stationing vans to provide free breast and prostate cancer screenings.

"That's always been our home. That's our community. Those are the people that walk into our emergency department," Reich said. "We're also a big employer in the community. And so having that devotion to the community is something that we've always valued."

As each hospital looks ahead to 2024, they are committed more than ever to their missions to provide high-quality care and remain at the forefront of technological and medical advances to help them reach their goals.

As urban areas like Houston, Texas, continue to grow, hospitals need to adapt and grow to serve their communities.

"I firmly believe that much of the digital innovation that we are experiencing today is going to accelerate and amplify the focus on safety and quality," Houston Methodist President and CEO Dr. Marc Boom said. "It's going to transform how we provide health care, it's a large part of the solution to many of the staffing shortages that we see nationally and whether it's the use of AI or other technologies, I think we're in a very exciting era around many of those times."