Quality Team Helps Connect the Dots for U.S. News Rankings
By Jean Yaeger
Strategies for process improvement are changing the approach Cook Children’s takes to the U.S. News & World Report rankings of the nation’s best children’s hospitals.
As we anticipate the announcement of the 2024-2025 rankings on Oct. 8, we wanted to share recent steps we’ve taken at Cook Children’s to improve collaboration and communication across departments.
What’s the goal? To provide a framework for completing the annual U.S. News applications, promoting our top specialties when the rankings are announced, and enhancing the care we provide to patients and their families.
Cook Children’s earned five gold badges on the 2023-2024 U.S. News Best Children’s Hospitals list:
· Pediatric Cancer -- #30 in the nation
· Pediatric Diabetes and Endocrinology -- #31 in the nation
· Pediatric Neurology and Neurosurgery -- #36 in the nation
· Pediatric Orthopedics -- #40 in the nation
· Pediatric Pulmonology and Lung Surgery-- #48 in the nation
These are the 10 specialties that U.S. News scores: Cancer; Cardiology and Heart Surgery; Diabetes and Endocrinology; Gastroenterology and Gastrointestinal Surgery; Neonatology; Nephrology; Neurology and Neurosurgery; Orthopedics; Pulmonology and Lung Surgery; and Urology.
New this year, the Top 50 Behavioral Health programs will also be recognized. In another change this year, the Best Children’s Hospitals Honor Roll will not be ranked 1-10, but instead will promote all 10 as equal in achieving the highest quality of care. The Honor Roll is calculated by adding the points each hospital receives from its separate rankings on specialties.
U.S. News gathers data from almost 200 medical centers to create the pediatric rankings. Each specialty’s score comes in part from its safety record, infection prevention, nurse staffing, surgical outcomes, advanced technologies and other specialty specific measures. Filling out the survey is a significant undertaking by a wide variety of Cook Children’s employees; they are the experts who answer thousands of questions to be considered in the rankings.
Two specialists from Cook Children’s Quality Performance Improvement – Kim Kimberling since 2021, and Noelia Echols since 2023 – see the big picture. They’re the hub for making the process more cohesive, streamlined, accurate and data-driven.
The data required to submit the U.S. News survey is no small task, led by Melina Shulyak, Director of the Analytics Institute, and Linda Mercado, Senior Business Intelligence Developer. In fact, Business Intelligence developers within the Cook Children’s Information Systems (IS) created 331 reports for the most recent round of U.S. News applications. Endocrinology was the specialty with the most reports at 83, followed by Neuroscience with 42 reports and Orthopedics with 35.
Noelia and Kim meet regularly with IS to help validate those reports as they are being generated. They also provide support to the staff members who answer survey questions using info from the IS reports.
“We have regular meetings, so I think that structure helps to keep us as well as them on track for submitting and meeting the deadlines,” Noelia said.
Kim and Noelia describe their role as twofold. First, they want to assist in collecting, verifying and reporting the answers in the surveys. Secondly, they want to apply their training in process improvement to find ways to increase compliance with survey measures. In other words … to move up in the rankings.
“Just as customers do when buying a car, we hope the public looks at these badges when they’re shopping for the care that their child is going to receive,” Kim said. “If my child is diagnosed with cancer, where would I go?
“We feel that these badges pull quite a bit of weight for families in making decisions on care and where they’re going to have a procedure done or get treatment,” she said. “We want to be ranked in all of the areas that U.S. News scores in.”
In the next Connect newsletter, we’ll take a deeper dive into what goes into the preparation and teamwork behind the rankings at Cook Children’s.
If you have questions or want to learn more, contact the Cook Children's U.S. News & World Report team at USNews@cookchildrens.org or go to our CookNet site.