UC San Diego Health has been recognized among the nation’s best hospitals for 2019-20 by U.S. News & World Report. The annual “Best Hospitals” rankings and ratings are designed to assist patients and their doctors in making informed decisions about where to receive care for challenging health conditions or for common elective procedures.
“UC San Diego Health is ranked among the top ten hospitals in California,” said Patty Maysent, CEO, UC San Diego Health. “As San Diego’s only academic health system, we are a recognized destination for patients with deeply complex diseases and conditions that require the multidisciplinary care and attention of nationally recognized experts.”
UC San Diego Health is rated by U.S. News & World Report as “high performing” in all nine common procedures and conditions, which covers a diverse spectrum of care from cancer surgeries to joint replacement to abdominal aortic aneurysm repair.
“These high ratings reflect our team’s commitment to providing reliable and consistently high-quality care to our patients,” said Maysent.
For the 2019-20 rankings and ratings, U.S. News & World Report evaluated more than 4,500 medical centers nationwide. In the 16 specialty areas, 165 hospitals were ranked in at least one specialty. UC San Diego Health ranked in four specialties:
- Pulmonology (14): For the past decade, UC San Diego Health has been consistently ranked in the top 20 for this medical specialty. Faculty perform leading-edge research and provide world-class care in multiple areas including pulmonary hypertension, advanced lung disease, asthma, cystic fibrosis, lung transplantation, critical care, sleep medicine, and interventional pulmonology. Among its accomplishments, UC San Diego Health pioneered the development of pulmonary thromboendarterectomy (PTE) and balloon pulmonary angioplasty for the treatment of chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension. More than 4,100 PTE surgeries have been performed.
- Geriatrics (29): UC San Diego Health’s Geriatrics and Gerontology team is committed to providing top quality and innovative care to older adults. With partners in Emergency Medicine, teams provide attentive care to seniors in the state-of-the-art Gary and Mary West Senior Emergency Care Unit which opened in 2019. The Geriatrics and Gerontology team are also members of the Age-Friendly Health System Action Community, an initiative in which teams across different U.S. health systems work together to accelerate implementation of age-friendly care to older adults.
- Neurology & Neurosurgery (40): UC San Diego Health remains an international destination for specialized, innovative neurologic care, distinguished by Level 4 Epilepsy, Level 1 Trauma, and Comprehensive Stroke Center certifications. Further recognized Centers of Excellence include Parkinson’s disease, Lewy Body Dementia, Huntington’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. Critical infrastructure including, four intra-operative MRI and CT suites, destination skull base tumor programs, and dedicated neurocritical care units allow the performance of path-defining procedures. With nearly $30M of NIH funding in 2018, UC San Diego Neurology and Neurosurgery develops and delivers premier treatment of neurological disease.
- Cardiology and Heart Surgery (44): The Cardiovascular Institute at UC San Diego Health offers the full spectrum of heart care services from medical management to heart failure, heart transplant, complex coronary interventions, robotic and minimally invasive cardiac surgery, structural heart disease, adult congenital heart disease, advanced cardiac ablations and cardiac rehabilitation. The heart transplant program currently boasts the best one-year survival rates in the United States with a high volume of more than 50 transplants per year.
The U.S. News & World Report “Best Hospitals” methodologies in most areas of care are based largely on objective measures, such as risk-adjusted survival and discharge-to-home rates, volume, and quality of nursing, among other care-related indicators.
“For 30 years, U.S. News has strived to make hospital quality more transparent to healthcare consumers nationwide,” said Ben Harder, managing editor and chief of health analysis at U.S. News & World Report. “By providing the most comprehensive data available on nearly every hospital across the United States, we give patients, families and physicians information to support their search for the best care across a range of procedures, conditions and specialties.”
In 2018, UC San Diego Health opened the Koman Family Outpatient Pavilion — the new 156,000-square-foot facility represents the most recent addition to the university’s world-class medical campus. In the past five years, UC San Diego Health has invested more than $1.3 billion dollars in patient care facilities for the community. Over the next five years, UC San Diego Health will expand access to it clinicians across the region through a series of primary care and same-day care clinic openings.
UC San Diego Health is comprised of UC San Diego Medical Center in Hillcrest and Jacobs Medical Center, Sulpizio Cardiovascular Institute, Moores Cancer Center, Shiley Eye Institute, and the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute, all in La Jolla, as well as primary care and same-day services at clinics throughout Southern California. UC San Diego Health Medical Center is home to the area’s only Regional Burn Center and one of only two Level I trauma centers in the county.
