Six New York hospitals rank among the best in the nation in the 2023-24 U.S. News & World Report rankings for children’s hospitals, which were released this morning.
New York-Presbyterian Children’s Hospital-Columbia and Cornell ranked first for the state, followed by Cohen Children’s Medical Center in second and Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital in third. Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone and University of Rochester-Golisano Children’s Hospital all tied for fourth place.
New York-Presbyterian had ten of its specialties ranked, Cohen Children’s had eight and Kravis had four, while the remaining facilities had three specialties ranked each. Specialties include pediatric cardiology and heart surgery, cancer, diabetes and endocrinology, gastroenterology and GI surgery, neonatology, neurosurgery, orthopedics, pulmonology and lung surgery and urology.
The rankings have changed slightly since last year: while New York-Presbyterian and Cohen’s kept their top spots, Children’s Hospital at Montefiore slipped one spot to fourth, as did Hassenfeld, and Mount Sinai Kravis kept its third place ranking.
Last year, the Lerner Children’s Pavilion at the Hospital for Special Surgery ranked ninth for orthopedics; this year it ranked 17th. Last year MSK Kids at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center ranked 18th for cancer, while this year it ranked 14th.
No New York hospital made the Honor Roll, a country-wide ten-institution list of hospitals that performed exceptionally across multiple specialities. Additionally, no New York hospitals ranked in the top five in the country for any specialty.
U.S. News worked with RTI International, a North Carolina-based research firm, to analyze data from 119 children’s hospitals around the country and survey thousands of pediatric specialists. According to the company’s methodology on this year’s rankings, in nine specialties, about 33% of each hospital’s score is tied to outcomes such as patient survival rates, infections and surgical complications–except for cardiology and heart surgery, where outcomes counted for about 38%.
More than 50% of each hospital’s score is based on metrics related to the facility’s commitment to patient safety, such as adherence to infection prevention practices, and clinical resources, family involvement, and other objective measures.
Ben Harder, managing editor at U.S. News, said that in New York, even though the last three state-ranked hospitals are all tied for fourth, they each have strengths and weaknesses and where a parent takes their child will depend on the type of care the child needs.
“If a parent has a child born with congenital heart disease, then of those three, our methodology identifies Hassenfeld as the strongest. It's ranked number 14 in cardiology and heart surgery,” he said. “Whereas if the patient has cancer, Golisano gets the higher ranking. Our rankings are intended to be a starting point to help families make a more informed decision but they're encouraged to look at the reams of data that we publish on our website and talk to their medical providers.”
When it comes to changes in the lists, Harder said it is very difficult for any facility to make the list, and sometimes young patients can experience good or bad outcomes through no fault of the hospital.
He encouraged parents to take each hospital’s ranking each year with a grain of salt, as each year’s list represents a snapshot in time. Parents should look for trends over time to best understand which hospitals are getting stronger and performing better.
Harder said the rankings methodology has shifted over the last few years to prioritize objective metrics over subjective expert opinions, because more objective performance measures have yielded the same results as when clinicians opinions’ held more weight.
This year, the weight of expert opinions decreased from 8% to 5% for pediatric cardiology and heart surgery, and from 13% to 10% for all other specialities.
Harder added that whether hospitals adhere to best practices now holds more weight than ever before. However, he said, “no amount of data is going to perfectly identify every aspect or every nuance of care. And so we think that the views of informed experts, the pediatricians who take care of these kids, does count for something and [is] meaningful information.”
Going forward, he added, he expects U.S. News to make further changes to its methodology based on feedback–there are 14 different working groups of volunteers who provide feedback, including parents and health care professionals.
U.S. News is headquartered in Washington, D.C. and has published children’s hospital rankings for the last 17 years. —Jacqueline Neber
June 21, 2023: This story has been updated to reflect that MSK Kids at Memorial Sloan Kettering and Lerner Children's Pavilion at the Hospital for Special Surgery each ranked for specialties this year and last year. They did not slip off the New York list.