America’s Best Hospitals: ‘Taking patient care a few steps beyond’

Companies in every industry strive for excellence. There are certain perks when you’re a notch above the rest: A prestigious name attracts talented employees, a trusted brand draws a loyal customer base. But greatness often comes at a price for consumers. As the adage goes, “You get what you pay for.” While many of us forego the daily luxuries for our wallets’ sake, there are a few areas where no one can afford to skimp. Health care is one of them.

When you or a loved one are sick, you want the utmost confidence in the care that they’re receiving. But what should you look for in a hospital, and what separates the good from the great? Newsweek connected with some of the nation’s top health system leaders to learn what sets their organizations apart. It turns out that they all follow similar playbooks—starting with the patient experience.

All hospitals are committed to health and healing, said Dr. Redonda Miller, president of The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore: “But truly exceptional hospitals are committed to taking patient care a few steps beyond traditional diagnosis and treatment.”

Sometimes, that looks like extra attention to little details—like making sure patients leave with their medications in hand or calling them after they discharge from the hospital to check in on their recovery at home.

“But it goes even further than that,” Miller said, “to sitting quietly with a patient and holding their hand after they’ve received bad news, or gathering the whole care team to cheer when a patient rings the bell at the end of cancer treatment, or even hosting a wedding in an intensive care unit so a father who doesn’t have long to live can give his daughter away.”

To provide that sort of support, hospitals must recruit staff members who are willing to go above and beyond—and they must recruit enough of them if they want people to have time for “extras.” This proves challenging for many hospitals as the industry grapples with major workforce shortages: Over 100 million Americans live in areas that are short on health professionals, according to the Healthcare Workforce Coalition.

Top-tier hospitals are not immune to workforce shortages, but some of them find recruitment easier than their peers. Leaders say that their organizations’ prestigious brands attract talent and they typically have the resources to offer competitive pay and benefits. There’s a sense of pride among employees at the nation’s best hospitals, according to David Entwistle, president and CEO of Stanford Health Care in California. He recalled a recent conversation with one of the health system’s housekeepers who excitedly shared her affiliation at a family party.

“She goes, ‘I was able to tell my family I work at Stanford,‘” Entwistle recounted. “That’s so cool. They have that pride—every academic [medical center] has that, and their communities are part of it.”

Indeed, academic medical centers—hospitals that are integrated with a medical school, also known as AMCs—tend to shine on industry rankings. On Newsweek‘s 2025 ranking of the World’s Best Hospitals, 41 of the American top 50 are AMCs.

These organizations tend to have robust research programs, producing cutting-edge therapies and technologies in house. Forward-thinking hospitals tend to differentiate themselves by looking beyond existing diagnostics and treatments, according to Dr. Howard Chrisman, president and CEO of Northwestern Medicine in Chicago.

“Institutions that invest in discovery, that find cures for disease, that can appropriately use technology and AI in a meaningful way to define what the next decade looks like…[they] begin to separate into an elite atmosphere of institutions that will define care today and tomorrow,” Chrisman said.

Dr. Brendan Carr, CEO of the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, echoed that point from across the country. He believes patients benefit from their “bench to bedside” approach, which applies new research discoveries to clinical care.

“We have an additional role and burden and privilege as academic medical centers,” Carr said. “We don’t just implement what the world tells us is the best care. It is our job to simultaneously execute on that and push boundaries.”

That iterative learning approach extends beyond the research lab, Carr said. Mount Sinai is always looking to improve ease and flow for patients, from the digital experience when you book an appointment to the financial experience when you pay the bill. Multiple health system CEOs that spoke with Newsweek expressed resistance to settling for past achievements.

“If organizations receive a lot of accolades and awards like we do, you can kind of rest on your laurels,” said Johnese Spisso, CEO of the UCLA Hospital System in Los Angeles. “We try to never rest on that. We try to listen to the feedback from patients and families every day to figure out how good we really are.”

Quality care outcomes are another important barometer for hospitals. They track multiple indicators to ensure patients are safe in their care, including the rate of new infections acquired within the hospital and the frequency of readmissions after patients are discharged. Patients don’t always know where to find these outcomes, Entwistle said: “I mean, when’s the last time you went into the clinic and asked, ‘What’s your mortality rate?'”

“It’s kind of motherhood and apple pie,” the Stanford Health Care CEO continued, “but [quality care] really is the baseline for the trust that you build with the communities that are coming in to see you.”

Leading health systems also build trust by making their services more accessible. They’re expanding offerings like telehealth visits, hospital-at-home programs and neighborhood clinics to take the hassle out of health care.

Richard Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, calls this “redefining the H”—taking that iconic “H” that symbolizes a hospital building and considering how care could be extended beyond the traditional facility.

It takes coordination to successfully expand a care network, according to Pollack. Health care leaders strive to create “integrated” systems which transition patients smoothly from one care setting to the next. Integrated systems strive for consistent results and seamless communications; for example, if you get a test done at one Northwestern Medicine location, any physician you follow up with in the health system can find those results in the systemwide electronic medical record.

Integrated care networks also support better patient outcomes, according to Spisso. At a system like UCLA Health, patients can receive primary and specialty care under the same umbrella.

“When we can care for patients throughout their lifetime, we can make sure that they’re getting the best preventative care, that we’re really following all our evidence-based guidelines and caring for any disease or illness that occurs at its earliest time,” Spisso said.

There’s one more similarity between top-performing hospitals, Pollack pointed out—they tend to have solid finances. Money supports all of those “extras” that tip the scale. It pays the talent, funds the research and backs the brand.

Some of the best hospitals have strong philanthropic arms. Most of them have a diverse payer mix, meaning a good portion of their revenue comes from commercial health insurers or self-pay plans. These tend to pay hospitals more for their services than Medicare and Medicaid.

That’s not to say that top hospitals don’t make hard financial decisions. In other industries, companies can choose which products or services to provide based solely on whether or not they are profitable. But “that is certainly not the way that academic medical centers like Mount Sinai are wired,” Carr said. “We make lots and lots of decisions that are terrible business decisions on purpose, because it’s tethered to our mission.”

Even the best hospitals must make trade-offs to balance the books, according to Carr. Sometimes, that means holding off on certain benefits in order to provide a vital service to the community. But generally, employees are supportive of those sacrifices.

The commitment to a mission, a greater good, is core to every hospital—not just the top ones, according to Pollack. All hospitals provide 24/7 care to anyone who walks through their doors, and they’re prepared to work through the unthinkable: from hurricanes to shootings to nuclear accidents. Each one offers essential public services to the best of its ability.

“Every hospital is great in its own way,” said Pollack, “because they are truly foundations for the communities that they serve.”

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