U.S. News & World Report Lists Best U.S. Hospitals for Diabetes
Diabetes Health magazine
Diabetes Health Staff | Jul 19, 2014
News magazine U.S. News & World Report has published a list of the top 10 American hospitals for treating diabetes and delivering endocrinological care. The magazine ranks the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, as the top U.S. hospital in the diabetes/endocrinology category, followed by Ohio's Cleveland Clinic.
The remaining eight top-ranked hospitals are:
3. Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston
4. Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore
5. UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco
6. New York-Presbyterian University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell, N.Y.
7. Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Conn.
8. Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago
9. UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles
10. University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle
Rankings were based on the hospitals' performance in several areas, including pain and wound management, genetic testing and counseling, and palliative care. Other factors in the ranking include technology, nursing staff, patient education, and how care is delivered, from intake to outcome or discharge.
Other criteria include a hospital's size, affiliation with a medical school, membership in the council of teaching hospitals, and overall patient statistics with regard to volume and mortality.
As well as the top 10 U.S. hospitals, the magazine ranked 40 other hospitals in the diabetes/endocrinology category to compile a top 50 list.
- See more at: http://diabeteshealth.com/read/2014/07/19/8320/u-s--news-and-world-report-lists-best-u-s--hospitals-for-diabetes/#sthash.a2yJra8K.dpuf
That's a very interesting site, Lloyd. Well, I have been a patient at 4 different hospitals here - Methodist, Abbott, Fairview, and Hennepin co.
Diabetes care in each of them was horrible, unbelievable, and frustrating to the max!!!!
Interesting. I wasn't able to click on the longer list without registering.
I find Kathy's experience with 4 of the hospitals interesting. I wonder if they take into account how PWD's are treated (diabetes wise) when they come into the hospital for non-diabetes reasons which basically is what most of us go for. The things they mentioned: "pain and wound management, testing and counseling and palliative care" aren't all that frequent. They don't mention DKA, though "testing and counseling" could relate to an initial diagnosis which is a good thing.
I am not surprised to see Mayo at the top of the list. And Boston Children's is at the top for the kiddos.
My favorite endo affiliates with a hospital that ranks 35 on the list. It was cool to find that data in the article.
Thanks, Karen. Interesting, though as I said above I don't know how relevant to the actual care one of us would get if admitted. Perhaps it says more about the endos associated with a given hospital than an actual hospital stay for a PWD.
I have been a T1 for a third of a century now. For big chunks of time I visited clinics in big research hospitals, but at other times (and currently) I see docs outside the hospital setting.
I look at the criteria used in the "Best Hospitals for Diabetes" comparison and I see no correspondence at all, with what actually corresponds to improving the standard of care for diabetics. (Whether they are in the hospital for a diabetes-related reason, or just coincidentally in the hospital for a non-diabetes reason but they still have diabetes.) And there have been huge leaps and bounds in the past decades in improving the standard of care that I have observed. There's still a long way to go but the best hospitals really have improved their services to diabetics, allowing diabetics to test bg's, determine dose and self-administor insulin, etc.
They are only reporting the rankings, not interviewing the patients and recording their feelings regarding the care they received. It's pretty much a statistical ranking collection based on patient surveys. I do the surveys when I get them. They don't ask specific questions regarding your condition. They allow some comment of course.
You are right, the yearly Best Hospitals Ranking does not report answers to the actual care received. But those experiences are subjective and difficult to rate. My admission may be very different from yours…and the reasons are so varied. If you want to see more, you can really click through the article and see the actual % scores on any hospital.
I actually did check the particulars for the hospital near me. The things they were rating didn't seem like the things most of us care about. It almost seems like an evaluation of how a given hospital treats diabetic patients in several aspects most of which aren't all that related to diabetes! To be a true evaluation of "diabetes care" I would be more interested in, as Tim mentions below, things like allowing insulin dependent diabetics to monitor and control their own D, or at least using more up to date protocols if they manage insulin; and correctly diagnosing and referring new diabetics (which would not include giving oral meds to anyone over the age of 30), and making other diabetes related interventions and referrals for follow up (such as of course dka, but also evidence of complications of various sorts or out of control blood sugars)
