Best Children’s Hospitals 2017: Arkansas Facility Makes U.S News Rankings

U.S. News and World Report released its annual rankings of the best children’s hospitals in the country, highlighting hospitals across 10 pediatric specialties. The rankings also looked at the best children’s hospitals by state and identified 10 hospitals that made it onto the honor roll, which are hospitals that deliver high quality care across many specialities.

One Arkansas hospital — Arkansas Children's Hospital in Little Rock — made the best children’s hospitals rankings. The hospital was ranked across four specialities. (For more local news, subscribe to the Little Rock Patch.)

The ten pediatric specialities highlighted in the rankings are:

1. Cancer
2. Cardiology and Heart Surgery
3. Diabetes and Endocrinology
4. Gastroenterology and Gastrointestinal Surgery
5. Neonatology
6. Nephrology
7. Neurology and Neurosurgery
8. Orthopedics
9. Pulmonology
10. Urology

Arkansas Children's Hospital ranked 37 for cardiology and heart surgery, 38 for neonatology, 47 for pulmonology and 48 for urology.

>>>Click here to see the top hospitals across every speciality.

The hospitals that made U.S. News’ honor roll are:

1. Boston Children’s Hospital
2. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
3. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
4. Texas Children’s Hospital
5. Johns Hopkins Children’s Center
6. Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
7. Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago
7. Nationwide Children’s Hospital
9. Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC
10. Children’s National Medical Center

U.S. News’ methodology includes measures such as clinical outcomes, patient volume, infection control and more. For all 10 categories, except cardiology and heart surgery, a third of the hospital’s score was tied to outcomes such as survival, infections and surgical complications. For cardiology and heart surgery, outcomes account for 38.3 percent of the score. More than 50 percent of the score was based on metrics for each hospital’s commitment to patient safety and the remainder of the score rested on a survey of pediatricians in the various specialties.

For the 2017-18 rankings, 113 hospitals turned over enough data to U.S. News to be evaluated in at least one specialty and 82 of those hospitals were ranked in one or more. Only the 50 top scoring hospitals across each specialty are ranked numerically.

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