Metrics changing for U.S. News rankings on children’s hospitals

The methodology for ranking the country’s best children’s hospitals in U.S. News and World Report will contain “several noteworthy changes” affecting the top 10 overall list and the rankings for pediatric cardiology and heart surgery.

The changes to the top 10 “honor roll” for 2017-18 mirror the methodology used for the first time in the overall hospital rankings last year, which “broadly assesses the quality of complex specialty care” delivered by the facilities.

“Specifically, hospitals will receive up to 25 Honor Roll points per specialty according to their position in a specialty’s rankings,” wrote U.S. News chief of health analysis Ben Harder and health rankings editor Avery Comarow. “The No. 1-ranked hospital will receive the 25-point maximum, the No. 2 hospital 24 points and so on to No. 20. Hospitals ranked No. 21 through 50 will all receive 5 points. A hospital’s points will be summed across all 10 specialties.”

Under this methodology, one of the top 10 children’s hospitals in 2016-17 wouldn’t have made the list, but Harder and Comarow didn’t specify which one.

A more specific will be the inclusion of adjusted mortality rates from the Congenital Heart Surgery Database (CHSD) in the pediatric cardiology rankings. According to Harder and Comarow, it’s accepted as the “most rigorously measured outcome in pediatric heart care.”

“Consequently, we have elected this year to accord substantial weight to this measure, which is new to the rankings, in calculating hospitals' overall score in that specialty,” they wrote. “Adjusted mortality rate will account for 20 percent of the overall score, and the weight of outcomes as a whole – including other CHSD measures and a measure from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients – will rise to 38.3 percent in that specialty, up from 33.3 percent last year.”

To balance out the new measure, the weight given to a hospital’s reputation score will be reduced to 10 percent, while remaining at 15 percent for other pediatric specialties.

The final change will involve the working groups of researchers, clinicians and hospital coding experts who review the survey questions and recommend changes before the rankings are released. Beginning this year, those members will be publicly identified.

The full methodology report for the 2017-18 U.S News rankings will become available to registered hospitals on June 6, then released to the public on June 27.