Penn Medicine Pulls Out of U.S. News Hospital Rankings

The pushback regarding U.S. News & World Report’s rankings continues to grow.

Earlier this year, following many medical schools forgoing participation in the rankings, a number of high-profile hospitals noted inherent differences between the two lists as justification for continuing to participate. However, on Monday, the University of Pennsylvania Health System, part of Penn Medicine, made a splash when it publicly announced that it will no longer actively participate in the “Best Hospitals” rankings.

Penn Medicine cited a “need for greater transparency and access to more comprehensive quality data beyond the narrow information collected by U.S. News & World Report,” noting that it remains committed to the annual publication of “consistent, objective performance metrics,” and that its leaders hope to work with other systems nationwide to “develop standardized measures for self-reporting on quality and performance.”

“The U.S. News and World Report ‘Best Hospitals’ methodology changes regularly, making it difficult to meaningfully draw conclusions about hospital quality over time, let alone the enormous amount of care provided outside the hospital,” Patrick Brennan, MD, chief medical officer at Penn Medicine, said in the health system’s statement.

“More importantly, these measures do not help us deliver better care for our patients, and they incentivize health systems to expend resources both to compete for placement in the rankings and promote their position on the list. Now is the time to focus our efforts, resources, and workforce talent on delivering the very best care and measuring the most impactful elements in medicine,” he added.

In response to this departure and the potential for more, Eric Gertler, executive chairman and CEO at U.S. News, said in a statement provided to MedPage Today in an email that the journalistic teams at U.S. News “painstakingly evolve the methodology each year to reflect changes in how healthcare gets delivered and in response to input from clinicians, hospital leaders, and other healthcare stakeholders.”

“This year’s rankings,” he wrote, “will be the first to incorporate measures of patient outcomes following outpatient surgeries, reflecting the growing role of outpatient care.”

However, Monday’s move by a regular fixture on the “Best Hospitals” list comes as U.S. News also faces criticism from another source as it rolled out its “Best Children’s Hospitals” rankings last week.

Specifically, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu announced that he had sent a letter to U.S. News seeking information on the outlet’s hospital rankings. The letter also urged the outlet to “publicly disclose the payments it receives from the hospitals it endorses, as required by federal regulations,” Chiu said in the announcement.

In response, a spokesperson for U.S. News told MedPage Today in an emailed statement that it “categorically disagrees with the assumptions and conclusions in the City Attorney’s letter.”

Aside from the tumult tied to the hospital rankings, this year’s “Best Medical Schools” list was released last month after a delay, after substantially changing from a preview that was posted online in April and subsequently pulled ahead of the final rankings, as MedPage Today previously reported.

The delay came after a number of high-profile medical and law schools publicly announced their own plans to no longer submit data to or participate in the rankings.

For its part, Penn Medicine said it is planning to develop a public-facing dashboard to include quality measures, such as readmission and infection rates, as well as data tied to emerging areas like telemedicine and home care.

Penn Medicine did acknowledge that U.S. News may continue to rank its hospitals even though it will “cease active participation in the process or results.”

Notably, the health system said that this includes no longer submitting information to the American Hospital Association’s Annual Survey, from which U.S. News draws data. However, it will continue to submit data required for publicly reportable hospital quality programs, including those maintained by CMS.