Adult Puzzle Books

More than half of all U.S. surgeries are now same-day procedures. Whether performed in a freestanding surgery center or in a hospital-based outpatient department, operations once inconceivable in such settings are now routine. Patients and healthcare professionals alike have embraced the trend, which at its best offers more convenience, better access, more time at home, greater efficiency and lower costs.

But like all medical interventions, same-day procedures carry certain risks. For a patient in need of a knee replacement, a colonoscopy, an operation for enlarged prostate, a cataract surgery, or any of numerous other procedures, it’s no easy task to identify which care sites have a solid record of safety and good outcomes.

U.S. News has for decades helped patients identify the best hospitals for a wide range of medical specialties and services. In 2024, we plan to broaden our focus to encompass care delivered at ambulatory surgery centers. Our intention is to introduce ratings of surgery centers for several different specialty areas.

To create these novel ratings, we’ll use several measures of patient outcomes, such as emergency department visit rates and costs associated with potentially avoidable complications.

We’ve teamed up with the healthcare analytics firm CareJourney, which has analyzed Medicare claims to calculate risk-adjusted rates of several outcomes for numerous types of procedures performed in ambulatory surgery centers.

U.S. News is developing a methodology to combine relevant measures to produce a composite rating for each of several key specialty areas: orthopedics & spine, gastroenterology, urology, and ophthalmology.

We anticipate releasing the first edition of the ambulatory surgery center ratings in the first half of 2024. More details about the methodology, once determined, will be made available in a future Second Opinion.

All Medicare-certified ambulatory surgery centers for which U.S. News has sufficient data — as many as approximately 5,000 centers in total — will be evaluated. Centers do not need to take any action in order to be considered, nor can they opt out of being evaluated.

Timeline Changes to Accommodate the New Ratings

Because this ambitious undertaking will require considerable time and effort on the part of U.S. News staff, the timing of other healthcare rankings’ release in 2024 will be modified.

Specifically, Best Children’s Hospitals will be released later in the year than it has in recent cycles. Anticipated key dates for the 2025 Best Children’s Hospitals rankings are September 17, 2024 — when embargoed results will become available to hospitals via the Dashboard and HDI — and October 8, 2024, the day the next edition of the rankings will be published on usnews.com. The 2023-2024 Best Children’s hospitals rankings will remain current and publicly available on USNews.com until October 8. We anticipate Best Children’s Hospitals will launch in the fall in subsequent years as well.

The timing of the next release of the adult Best Hospitals rankings and ratings will also differ slightly from prior years. Anticipated key dates in 2024 are June 27 (embargoed results available) and July 16 (publication on usnews.com).

The general timing of Best Hospitals for Maternity Care and of data collection surveys for Best Children’s Hospitals and Best Hospitals, including the Pediatric Hospital Survey, the Physician Survey and the Maternity Services Survey, will not change appreciably from 2023 to 2024. Event registration is now open for an upcoming webinar on Best Children’s Hospitals, where updates to the Pediatric Hospital Survey will be reviewed. Potential methodology changes to Best Hospitals may be described in a separate webinar, subsequent blog posts and other venues.