Health System wins high national rank, loses financial status

HUP was ranked as one of America's best hospitals by 'U.S. News and World Report.' Colleges and universities regularly skewer U.S. News & World Report's rankings of the nation's top educational institutions, but for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, the magazine's annual "America's Best Hospitals" issue is a welcome source of pride. For the second straight year, HUP made the weekly newsmagazine's "Honor Roll" as one of the top hospitals in the country. Placing 11th on the list of the 14 "Honor Roll" hospitals, HUP was tops in the Delaware Valley and ranked fourth on the eastern seaboard -- behind only No. 1 Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital, the Boston institutions listed as No. 3 and 8 respectively in the national rankings. HUP was ranked No. 14 in last year's survey. "We're thrilled to be ranked among the top hospitals in the country," HUP spokesperson Lori Doyle said. "Our physicians and employees deserve a lot of credit." U.S. News ranked HUP among the top 25 hospitals nationwide in 13 of the 16 medical specialties used in tabulating the results. Its highest placement was at No. 9 in neurology, but the hospital also won recognition in the fields of cardiology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, geriatrics, gynecology, oncology, orthopedics, otolaryngology, psychiatry, pulmonary disease, rheumatology and urology. The AIDS treatment specialty, in which HUP placed highly last year, was eliminated this year due to the emphasis on treating AIDS patients through outpatient clinics, rather than as hospital inpatients. Additionally, for the second year in a row, the Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania placed second nationally in pediatrics, again ranking behind only Boston's Children's Hospital. Other Philadelphia area hospitals to receive high marks in one or more of the 16 specialties include the Fox Chase Cancer Center, Temple University Hospital and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. HUP Chief Medical Officer David Shulkin welcomed the rankings as a positive means for consumers -- that is, patients -- to choose the highest-quality medical care for themselves. "That issue seems to be the single most important public ranking available to the people," he said. "It's something that has been shown to be effective." While describing himself as "delighted" about the rankings, Shulkin also accepted the magazine's inherent limitations. "It is a magazine for lay people," he said. "It's not a scientific instrument." The magazine, dated July 27 and available on newsstands last week, sifted through 6,400 hospitals nationwide in order to make its rankings. U.S. News first published its list of America's best hospitals in 1990. The rankings were based on an index that weights the hospital's reputation equally with its mortality rate and American Hospital Association information on the number of nurses at the hospital, the level of technology available to patients and other medical information. In order to compound this year's "reputational score" upon which specialty rankings are based, U.S. News surveyed 150 specialists in each of the 16 fields each year for the last three years and compounded the scores.