U.S. News’ specialty-based ratings are a mixture of objective quality measures and reputation scores, collected by asking the opinions of a set nationwide list of physicians in each specialty.
In all cases, hospitals ranked first in each specialty would not have reached that level without the aid of reputation scores, according to researchers at Case Western Reserve University.
U.S. News’ reputation scores were “minimally associated” with objective quality measures, researchers said.
Read the Annals of Internal Medicine’s study on hospital rankings.
