U.S. News & World Report Rankings: Priority on Process Improvement
The 2025-2026 U.S. News & World Report rankings are scheduled to come out on Oct. 7. Here's a look at the 2024-2025 rankings.
Teams across Cook Children’s play a role in collecting and submitting the data that U.S. News & World Report uses to rank the nation’s top children’s hospitals each year.
As we look ahead to the 2025-2026 rankings coming out Oct. 7, we wanted to pull back the curtain on the strategies at Cook Children’s that go into completing these annual surveys. Key partnerships involve our staff from Quality Process Improvement (QPI), Information Systems (IS), Research Administration Office, Global Health Services, Business Development, Data Analytics, Marketing, Communications and leaders within the individual specialties.
First, some background … U.S. News evaluates children’s hospitals and pediatric specialties across the country based on quality of care, clinical research, safety record, infection prevention, surgical outcomes, advanced technologies, recognition as a Nurse Magnet Hospital and much more. Data from 108 children’s hospitals were analyzed to generate the rankings last year.
The 2024-2025 pediatric specialties list included seven programs at Cook Children’s:and in 2023, five specialties at Cook Children’s received gold badges in the U.S. News rankings.
Matthew Carroll, M.D. and VP Associate Chief Quality Officer, said the approach Cook Children’s takes to the rankings has always focused on improving care for our patients.
“U.S. News provides an annual self-assessment that highlights where there may be opportunities for improvement within our organization, but we don’t pursue points just for the sake of points. We want to pursue points that truly improve the care we deliver,” Dr. Carroll said.
“We partner with clinical leaders in each specialty and across the organization to evaluate those opportunities and determine which ones could result in improvements in the care we deliver, and those are the areas we focus our efforts,” he said.
To be considered in the U.S. News rankings, our departments answer hundreds of survey questions based on data from IS reports. Cook Children’s a few years ago tapped QPI specialists Kim Kimberling and Noelia Echols to work with group leaders to help increase their performance with survey measures. Their goal? To give U.S. News the fullest picture of the top-notch care Cook Children’s provides for patients and families.
The involvement of Noelia and Kim improves collaboration and communication. They make tasks more streamlined and data-driven. Kim and Noelia validate the IS reports and provide support to the employees who fill out the surveys. Their role keeps everyone on track to meet deadlines.
QPI Director Anthony Mason said his team in 2025 applied a process improvement tool for decision making that aims to maximize results in two ways: effort and expected outcome. The tool – called a PICK chart – helps teams quickly group tasks by impact and effort so they can focus on the ones most likely to improve results.
“By adopting this approach, departments were able to focus more efficiently on meaningful process improvements that support both rankings and patient care,” Anthony said.
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.