U.S. News & World Report Ranks Emory Among Nation's Best Hospitals for 2009

Emory University Hospital again joins the prestigious ranks of America's top medical institutions in the annual U.S. News & World Report guide to "America's Best Hospitals."

For 2009, Emory ranked among the nation's best hospitals in 11 specialties, including five top 20 rankings. Overall, Emory is one of only 170 hospitals, out of more than 5,400 medical centers in the country to be named in even one of the magazine's top 50 specialty rankings. Emory is the only acute care hospital in Georgia named in these rankings.

Emory is recognized in this year's comprehensive report for excellence in:

Specialty Rank
Ophthalmology 9
Psychiatry 10
Geriatrics 13
Heart and Heart Surgery 13
Neurology and Neurosurgery 14
Ear, Nose and Throat 22
Kidney Disease 25
Diabetes/Endocrinology 31
Gynecology 44
Urology 44
Cancer 46

“Emory Healthcare’s rankings reflect our ongoing promise to patients and families,” says John T. Fox, Emory Healthcare president and CEO. “That promise is a relentless commitment to quality, quality defined as excellence in clinical outcomes, patient safety and service. As an academic medical center, we are committed to sharing that remarkable synergy created by breakthrough research, exceptional clinical resources and compassionate care.

“Being ranked this year in three additional subspecialty areas also reflects Emory’s commitment to recruiting staff and physicians across all subspecialties who embrace the challenge of advancing the possibilities in diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease,“ Fox continues.

The U.S. News rankings in 12 of the 16 specialties weigh three elements equally: reputation, death rate, and a set of care-related factors such as nursing and patient services. In these 12 specialties, hospitals have to pass through several gates to be ranked and considered a Best Hospital:

1. The first filter determines whether a hospital is eligible to be ranked at all by requiring that any of three conditions be met--to be a teaching hospital, to be affiliated with a teaching hospital, or to have at least six important medical technologies from a defined list of 13.

2. The second filter determines whether a hospital is eligible to be ranked in a particular specialty. To be eligible, the hospital had to either have at least a specified volume in certain procedures and conditions over three years, or had to have been nominated in our yearly specialist survey.

3. The third filter is whether a hospital does well enough to be ranked, based on its reputation, death rate, and factors like nurse staffing and technology.

In the four other specialties--ophthalmology, psychiatry, rehabilitation, and rheumatology--ranking is based solely on reputation, derived from the three most recent physician surveys.
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