Inova Fairfax Hospital in Northern Virginia earned the highest marks of any hospital in the D.C. metro area, while Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore ranked No. 4 nationally in U.S. News & World Report’s 2021-2022 “Best Hospitals” report.
Inova Fairfax Hospital was ranked among the best in the country in gynecology, but perhaps more strikingly it was rated “high-performing in nearly every procedure and condition that we evaluated hospitals in — 16 out of 17,” said Ben Harder, U.S. News managing editor and chief of health analysis.
Tying for second place in the region are MedStar Washington Hospital Center in D.C. and Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington.
Other high-ranking hospitals in the D.C. area include Inova Fair Oaks Hospital in Chantilly, Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, which are both in Virginia, and Sibley Memorial Hospital in D.C.
The report also names Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore the fourth-best in the country overall. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, is ranked No. 1 overall for the sixth straight year. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio comes in at No. 2, followed by UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles at No. 3.
U.S. News ranks Johns Hopkins high nationwide for many medical specialties, including ophthalmology; ear, nose and throat; neurology and neurosurgery; as well as urology.
For the 2021-2022 report, U.S. News evaluated more than 4,750 hospitals nationwide and ranked the best for 15 medical specialties, such as cancer, diabetes and endocrinology, and psychiatry. It also ranked them for 17 procedures and conditions, up from 10 last year. The new ones are heart attack, stroke, pneumonia, diabetes, kidney failure, hip fracture and back surgery (spinal fusion).
Also this year, U.S. News changed the way it evaluates hospitals that provide inpatient rehabilitation.
“We have added a lot of additional measures of objective quality indicators into that evaluation this year,” Harder said.
For the first time, the report looked into whether or not the racial and ethnic backgrounds of people treated at hospitals was a good representative of the people who live near those hospitals.
“We found, in many cases, hospitals were treating a disproportionately white patient population for many therapeutic procedures — things like knee replacement, hip replacement, other orthopedic procedures, cancer surgeries and heart surgeries,” Harder said.
The rankings do not reflect the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on hospitals because the analysis is based on the most recently available data from the federal government, which dates from 2019.