What are the best hospitals in the Charlotte region? Here are the latest rankings
.jpg "A new list reveals the top-ranked hospitals near Charlotte, North Carolina. Getty Images | Royalty Free")
The latest hospital rankings are out, and the Charlotte area’s top medical center got national attention.
Carolinas Medical Center was named the best facility in the region on a U.S. News & World Report list published Tuesday.
Carolinas Healthcare System Pineville in Charlotte and CaroMont Regional Medical Center in Gastonia tied for the No. 2 spot on the list, which included rankings for three area hospitals.
Carolinas Medical Center, part of Atrium Health, also earned the No. 3 spot statewide, findings show. It was in national rankings for one adult and eight pediatric specialties, according to U.S. News & World Report.
Duke University and UNC Hospitals were the highest-ranking in the state and placed nationally in several categories, results show.
It was the second consecutive year Duke University Hospital missed the Honor Roll, a list of about 20 top hospitals in the country. The medical center made its last appearance in 2018, when it held the 19th spot, The News & Observer reported.
In an article published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Duke authors argue U.S. News & World Report rankings miss the mark on accounting for some health situations patients face. The article says life expectancy is lower in the Southeast, which has no hospitals on the 2020-21 Honor Roll.
“By failing to adequately account for patients’ socioeconomic status, underlying health status and life expectancy, U.S. News inaccurately measures the skill and quality with which hospitals provide care,” Sarah Avery, director of the Duke Health News Office, said in an email. “As a result, hospitals in regions with less privileged populations are inadequately assessed and are sometimes denied the prestige, resources, and recognition that can come from a high ranking.”
In an emailed statement, Ben Harder of U.S. News & World Report wrote: “Accounting for differences in health status and social determinants of health is vitally important in healthcare measurement. That’s why, since 2015, U.S. News has made statistical adjustments in its rankings and ratings to account for socioeconomic status.
“While no such adjustment is perfect because of limitations in the data available to researchers, the current U.S. News approach — which adjusts for patient-level socioeconomic status — is scientifically more appropriate than a region-level adjustment, which the authors of the viewpoint propose,” said Harder, managing editor and chief of health analysis.
The hospital rankings are widely used and have been around more than 30 years. To come up with this year’s Honor Roll, analysts say they scored roughly 5,000 hospitals for their performance in 16 specialties.
In North Carolina, U.S. News & World Report says it analyzed 132 hospitals, with 17 meeting high enough standards to make it into the rankings.
The specialty rankings are “based largely on survival rates for particularly challenging patients, on patient experience and on other measures of performance that can be assessed using hard data,” according to the survey.
Hospitals are also evaluated through “procedure and condition ratings,” U.S. News & World Report said in its methodology. The analyses shouldn’t take the place of a health professional’s recommendations, according to the results.
The results were collected before the coronavirus pandemic, according to the methodology.
This story was originally published July 28, 2020 at 12:45 PM.
