OAKLAND, CA — U.S. News & World Report has released its latest rankings of the best hospitals in the United States with an updated methodology that emphasizes two new patient-centric measures. In Oakland, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center-Oakland made the Top 10 List of best hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"We use a number of different measures to assess hospital quality and we separately assess each hospital in many different specialties and services that hospitals offer," Ben Harder, managing editor and chief of health analysis at U.S. News told Patch. The hospital rankings for 2019-20 include the honor roll, top ranked hospitals in 12 specialty categories and the top ranked hospitals by state and metro region.

Across the 12 specialty rankings — which cover categories like cancer, cardiology and heart surgery, diabetes and endocrinology, and nephrology — U.S. News & World added two new measures that are patient centered: patient outcome and patient experience. "In each of those areas, we are now assessing how successful a hospital is at sending patients home," Harder said. The rankings now look at whether after receiving care, patients end up going home or require further care at a rehab facility or even at a different hospital.

"That's an important outcome for patients," Harder said. "Patients do want to be home recovering and spending time with their families." However, the methodology adjusts for how sick a patient was when they were admitted to the hospital so that hospitals that admit sicker patients are not penalized in the rankings.

The second patient-centered measure added to the methodology is patient experience. Data from a federally mandated survey was used to assess this measure, according to U.S. News.

The survey covers topics like how good doctors and nurses were at communicating with patients and how well a patient understood how to take care of themselves after leaving the hospital.

"So that patient experience dimension is one that we added to our specialty rankings this year, and obviously that's important for patients too because they not only want to get good care and have a good outcome but also feel that what mattered to them was considered and taken into account in the care they got," Harder said. Honor Roll Hospitals