Becoming great: 5 common characteristics of the best hospitals

The U.S. News & World Report released the full list of 2024-2025 Best Hospitals Honor Roll on July 16, 2024. The 20 adult hospitals are the top-ranked hospitals in the nation. This year, the list of adult hospitals was limited from 22 to 20. 

Their list for the 2024-2025 Best Children’s Hospital Honor Roll was later published on Oct. 8, 2024, and includes 10 healthcare organizations recognized across 11 specialties such as pediatric cancer, pediatric orthopedics and more.  

What do these hospitals have in common? The U.S. News & World Report methodology will tell you that they are, objectively, the best: Researchers pore over deep data on measures such as patient outcomes, patient experience, and other care-related indicators like nurse staffing and patient volume.   

But that inherently begs the question: How were these hospitals able to achieve such impressive results in the first place? How did they become great?  

Through our longstanding relationships with nearly every one of these prestigious organizations, Spok is honored to have a front-row seat to how they operate and insight into how they’re able to perform and deliver at such a high level. These are the top five characteristics that all the Best Hospitals embody every day:  

1. Put patients first  

It’s one thing to say you put patients first. It’s completely different to actually embed that mantra into every department and interaction. Whether it’s something as simple as posting a wayfinding sign to guide patients to the right place, or as complex as implementing enterprise technology for clinicians, at every turn these hospitals are asking ‘How will this impact our patients?’ Every employee, whether or not they have a clinical or patient-facing role, has a patient-centric mindset and ‘patients come first’ is embedded in their DNA.  

2. Deliver compassionate care  

Patients enter through hospital doors at the most vulnerable time in their lives. They’re looking not only to get better, but they’re also seeking comfort. They’re searching for reassurance from healthcare professionals who will communicate with them directly and honestly, explain ‘here’s what we’re going to do’, and know they’re not alone in the battle they’re facing. The best hospitals deeply understand that empathy is a critical component of delivering exceptional patient care. They approach each patient as an individual, not a number or a disease or a condition. They treat them, and their families, like they would want their own loved ones to be treated.  

3. Commit to excellence  

These organizations didn’t land on the Best Hospitals Honor Roll by accident. The overwhelming majority have been on the list before – sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. That speaks to a systematic, purposeful commitment to excellence. It means their staff is dedicated to reviewing and measuring everything they do on a routine basis and employing process improvements, lean methodologies, and new technologies to do it even better. From the C-suite leaders to the clinicians to the contact center operators, they are fully committed to delivering the best outcomes and making their communities healthier.  

4. Foster a culture of innovation  

Another differentiator of the best hospitals is the willingness to take risks and invest in innovation to propel them to new heights. This may come in the form of leveraging state-of-the-art technologies, like digitally simulated image-guided operations or machine learning to aid diagnosis, or the latest evidence-based treatments. It could mean continuing to improve  communication and collaboration among care teams. Innovation is all about finding new ways to make care better.  

5. Trust Spok for clinical communication  

You probably knew this one was coming if you already saw our news release: Hospitals honored on the U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals and Best Childrens’ Hospital lists trust Spok for clinical communication. Over the past decade, nearly every hospital named on both lists has used or continues to use Spok solutions. This year, 18 of 20 hospitals on the adult hospitals honor roll and 9 out of 10 children’s hospitals rely on Spok.  

 Each organization leverages Spok solutions to facilitate smarter, faster communication among their care teams. They all use it in their own way—they each have their own unique workflows, diverse device mix, and so on—but what’s most important is that they can count on it.  

Staff at Spok hospitals know that when they send a message it will arrive at the expected destination. When a patient hits their nurse call button or a patient monitoring device or clinical surveillance system indicates that something is going wrong, that notification is automatically sent to the right person or the right team for rapid response. When a loved one calls into the contact center to check on the status of a patient, the operator can quickly relay valuable information and provide some peace of mind.  

As you can see, the Best Hospitals have much more in common than objective results and hard metrics. They put the patient first in everything they do, approach care with compassion and understanding, are committed to rigors required for excellence, foster a culture of innovation, and rely on Spok for communication when seconds count.  

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2018 and has been updated for relevancy and accuracy.