Duke Health, Covenant Health and Baylor Scott & White Health hospitals topped the honor roll of “socially responsible” acute care hospitals, a collection of 125 facilities highlighted by the Lown Institute for their equity, value and care outcomes.
The list, unveiled Tuesday, picks out the top performers among 2,717 U.S. hospitals based on 54 performance metrics. Seventy hospitals had been named to last year’s list as well.
The Lown Institute’s top acute care hospitals, in descending order, were Duke Regional Hospital, Fort Loudoun Medical Center, Baylor Scott & White Medical Center - Pflugerville, Denver Health Main Campus and Methodist Medical Center.
The group also gave top marks to 45 of the 800 critical access hospitals it graded, 15 of which had a similar performance last year. At the top of this class were Western Wisconsin Health, Mayo Clinic Health System - Chippewa Valley and Platte County Memorial Hospital.
At the health system level, Nebraska Medicine received the top spot. It was followed by Duke Health, UCHealth (Colorado), MaineHealth and St. Luke’s University Health Network.
The Lown Institute said the named facilities and systems offer evidence that hospitals can serve their communities amid headwinds such as inflation-driven spending increases or workforce shortages.
“These hospitals show that no matter how tough the environment gets, putting patients and communities first is always possible,” Vikas Saini, M.D., president of the Lown Institute. “Those returning to the list prove that equitable, high-value care doesn’t have to be rare, it’s a standard hospitals can uphold year after year.”
The healthcare think tank also highlighted executive compensation among the rated hospitals, noting that “most” of the acute care hospitals named to its honor roll “paid their CEO below the average amount compared to hospitals of a similar size.”
Additionally, eight states with at least 10 rated hospitals didn’t have any that made Lown’s honor roll: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia. More honor roll hospitals hailed from Pennsylvania than any other state.
The group collected its numbers from a host of publicly available data including Medicare and Medicare Advantage claims, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data sets and IRS filings.
From these, Lown’s researchers gauged social responsibility by looking at acute care hospitals’ performance within the major categories of equity (20% pay equity, 40% inclusivity and 40% community benefit), value of care (40% avoiding overuse and 60% cost efficiency) and patient outcomes (62.5% clinical outcomes, 25% patient safety and 12.5% patient satisfaction).
That approach brought broad overlap with the facilities named to the 2024-25 Honor Roll from U.S. News & World Report within the outcomes and value sections of the analysis. However, Lown only handed out “A” ratings for equity to three of the top hospitals featured on the other ranking: Rush University Medical Center (“A” rating overall), the Johns Hopkins Hospital (“B” overall) and the Mount Sinai Hospital (“A” overall).
“Other hospital rankings focus on patient outcomes, but that doesn’t tell the whole story,” Saini told Fierce Healthcare. "Our rankings set a higher bar by giving equal importance to equity, value and outcomes measures. The results show that this kind of exceptional care is not only possible, it’s happening at hospitals all across the country.”
U.S. News, which publishes an annual list of top hospitals that's among the industry’s most prominent, faced criticism in late 2022 for methodology that gave little weight to conditions that more often affect the underserved. The publication has displayed hospital levels of health equity alongside its ratings since 2020, but highlighted ongoing work to adjust its component measures ahead of the 2023-24 release in response to the critiques. U.S. News is set to release the latest iteration of the ranking before the end of the summer.