Hopkins Tops 'Best Hospitals' List

Good hospital care is often around the corner if all you need is a routine procedure or, in many cases, even major surgery. But a difficult condition or a complex operation demands a higher standard of care, especially if the risk is compounded by advanced age, frailty, obesity or some other complications.

There are people who at some point in their lives need the best level of medical help whether it is diagnosis or treatment.

Since 1990, U.S. News & World Report's "America's Best Hospitals" issue has set out to identify the best medical centers in the United States for specialized health care in areas from cancer to heart disease and much more.

Most of the ranked institutions are referral centers, where the sickest patients are sent for advanced care. Such hospitals follow and often pioneer new treatment guidelines. They conduct bench-to-bedside research. And they exploit the latest advances in imaging, surgical devices, and other technologies.

"We used a lot of different criteria," Avery Comarow, senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, told CBS News The Early Show co-anchor Hannah Storm. "One of the most important is sort of a peer review, what specialists think of hospitals in their specialty for very tough cases, not for average cases. We look at death rate. We look at the nursing, that sort of thing. It's a combination of factors."

The U.S. News issue and website package ranks hospitals in 16 specialties, from cancer and heart disease to pediatrics and urology. Geriatrics was dropped this year, because it is oriented more to primary care than to specialized hospital treatment. Out of the 5,189 hospitals evaluated, just 176 scored high enough this year in such measures of quality as mortality and patient volume to be ranked in any specialty.

Fourteen hospitals made U.S. News' Honor Roll by demonstrating exceptional breadth of excellence. The Honor Roll is a snapshot of hospitals that do a lot of things very well. To be on the Honor Roll, you have to rank very high in at least 6 of the 17 specialties in which hospitals were ranked.

Johns Hopkins in Baltimore tops the Honor Roll list.

"They've cemented themselves to that number one position," Comarow said. "And the reason they're there is they do a lot of different things extremely well."

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., was second on the Honor Roll list with the Cleveland Clinic third.

"They (Mayo) are legendary and deservedly so," Comarow pointed out. "They also do a lot of things very well. Not quite as many as Hopkins, but you're picking between giants here.

"Cleveland Clinic, everybody thinks of as a heart disease place, and the fact is, they're an extraordinarily good all-around hospital," Comarow noted.

In 11 of the 16 specialties, hard data largely determine a hospital's position. In the other five, the rankings are based only on hospitals' reputation among specialist physicians.

A hospital's overall performance is summed up by its U.S. News Score, made up of three equal parts: reputation, mortality, and a mix of care-related factors such as nursing and patient services. The 50 hospitals in each specialty with the highest scores are listed.