America’s Best Hospitals Lists

Once designed to help physicians deliver acute care to the very ill, hospitals today are expected to be allies in wellness for patients, their families, and the community as a whole. Yet the current environment hardly fosters such success. Cost escalation threatens the financial health of both patients and the industry. Healthcare professionals make mistakes and machines malfunction. Increasing public awareness of these errors makes consumers wary of hospitals as healing environments. Numerous organizations and agencies are watching, penalizing and providing little help.

Countless tools and methodologies put strategies and data at hospital leaders’ fingertips. Yet figuring out how to identify the actions to take and successfully communicate quality initiatives across levels, departments, locations, and shifts can leave many leaders scratching their heads. How does the hospital leadership take an idea that sounds great on paper, such as teamwork or engagement and culture, and then engage every team to strive toward quality?We asked those who appear to have found a way to do just that—members of the Healthgrades 2014 America’s Best Hospitals Award™ recipients. They herald from all over the United States, from hospitals that are large and small, for-profit and nonprofit, teaching and nonteaching. They have in common the hard-earned honor of achieving a top priority: clinical outcomes that are better than expected in the majority of the most common procedures for at least four consecutive years.