U.S. News & World Report recently published its annual Best Hospitals issue, which the magazine claims is the global authority in hospital rankings. That may be no exaggeration, given the more than two million Google results that appear with the search term U.S. News hospital rankings along with the flurry of self-congratulatory tweets posted and banners hung each year by the hospitals whose names appear at the top of the list. While the top-ranked hospitals were patting themselves on the back, we wondered if the magazines ranking system actually measures what matters to patients, or for that matter to anybody who is worried about the cost and quality of US health care. So we took a closer look at how U.S. News measures hospital quality andjust as importantwhat factors its analysis leaves out.

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