Nobody wants to go to the hospital if it can be avoided, especially during a pandemic. And when people do have to go, they want the hospital to be a good one — or, better yet, one of the best. (You don’t want to get sick in one of the 25 cities with the worst hospital quality.)

24/7 Tempo has compiled a list of the 29 best hospitals in America, according to The Leapfrog Group’s Hospital Survey for 2020, which uses a variety of national performance measures to evaluate individual institutions on safety, quality, and efficiency.  

The survey covers more than 2,700 hospitals. Not all offer the same services but to score among the best, they had to have high scores in relevant categories. 

Click here to see the best hospitals in America

To identify the best hospitals in America, 24/7 Tempo reviewed the 2020 Hospital Survey published by The Leapfrog Group, which collects and analyzes data on health care safety and quality in America. The survey rates hospitals on such matters as preventing and responding to patient harm; medication safety; healthcare-associated infections; maternity care; pediatric care; critical care; complex adult and pediatric surgery; care for elective outpatient surgery patients; and elective outpatient surgery for adults and children. To be ranked among the best, a hospital needed to receive an A grade in the Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, and to score among the highest institutions overall. Hospital locations were manually researched.

Interestingly, while preventing and responding to patient harm would seem crucial to all hospitals’ missions, many did not achieve top marks for so simple a measure as handwashing. (These are the states with the worst health care systems.)

Healthcare-associated infections are of concern to everybody, especially in the COVID era. 

(These are infections developed by the patient while in the hospital as a result of poor infection-control practices.) Among the more troubling findings of the survey was that some facilities had shortcomings with respect to the spread of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a type of staph bacteria that is resistant to many antibiotics.  

Though not all the hospitals on this list score highly across the board, in all cases the good aspects of the care they provide far outweigh the bad.