According to a recent regional study, high-quality patient outcomes helped UT Southwestern Medical Center outperform its peer hospitals in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area.
“Among the outcomes that we look at is mortality and whether the patient survived not only during their hospitalization but after they went home,” said Ben Harder, U.S. News managing editor and chief of health analysis. “Were they still alive at least a month after they went home? We also look at whether the patient was well enough at the end of their hospital stay to go home directly or whether they needed to go to a rehab facility for some period of time.”
U.S. News 2020 Best Hospitals in Dallas-Forth Worth found that UT Southwestern ranked nationally in 9 specialties including cancer, cardiology, heart surgery, diabetes, pulmonology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, geriatrics, neurology and neurosurgery.
“We’re identifying with these national rankings hospitals that patients might seek out for referral care in a particular specialty,” Harder told Dallas Express. “It’s the sort of care that a patient might need to travel for, or might get a second opinion for, from someone at a leading innovative center that has a referral practice.”
Although measures of equity will not be factored into 2021 rankings, Harder noted they will be reported separately.
“We found overwhelmingly that hospitals treated populations that were whiter on average than the community surrounding them and that obviously represents problems of access to care for black and minority patients or patients of color,” he said.
Baylor University Medical Center and Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital scored second and third place on the 2020 list.
“Dallas has about a third of the top 25 to 30 hospitals in Texas, which clearly indicates that the Dallas Fort Worth metro area has a concentration of highly capable hospitals to provide the wide range of services from referral specialty care that you see at UT Southwestern and half a dozen or more procedures and conditions at hospitals like Methodist Dallas,” Harder said in an interview.
Methodist Dallas Medical Center landed in 8th place with high performance in six procedures and conditions. High performance in a specialty is considered an honorable mention for hospitals that are excellent but fail to rank in the top 50 hospitals nationwide.
“Even if a hospital is not ranked nationally or ranked in the Dallas Fort Worth Metro area, it can still be recognized if they’ve got certain strengths and certain areas where they provide really high-quality care to their patients,” Harder said. “Methodist Dallas is high-performing in six of the procedures and conditions, which is more good ratings than most hospitals get and that’s one reason that they are, in fact, ranked in Dallas-Fort Worth.”
However, the top Dallas-Fort Worth hospitals were not evaluated for COVID-19 outcomes because evaluations occurred before the pandemic.
“This study represents how strong they were going into the pandemic, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect exactly what’s happening now and how they’re dealing with the stresses of COVID,” Harder added.