Latest ‘Best Hospitals for Maternity Care’ List Has More States With High Performers

For expectant mother and father contemplating the place to hunt maternity care, these 297 amenities earned top marks on this 12 months’s “Best Hospitals for Maternity Care” record from U.S. News & World Report.

Last year on the inaugural record, eight states boasted 10 or extra high-performing hospitals. This 12 months, that quantity rose to a dozen states, with California, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania main the pack.

There have been, nonetheless, a handful of states — Alaska, Mississippi, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and South Dakota — that didn’t have hospitals collaborating within the rankings, whereas New Mexico, Vermont, and the District of Columbia had no high performers, in accordance with U.S. News.

“When expectant parents are considering their options for welcoming a baby into the world, the ‘Best Hospitals for Maternity Care’ is designed to help them identify hospitals that excel in delivering babies for uncomplicated pregnancies,” mentioned Min Hee Seo, PhD, senior well being knowledge scientist at U.S. News, in an announcement.

In saying this 12 months’s record, U.S. News mentioned that it evaluated 649 collaborating hospitals that present labor and supply companies. Just beneath 300 hospitals acquired a high-performing designation.

Methodology included 4 measures not beforehand factored into the evaluation, together with episiotomy charges, vaginal beginning after cesarean charges, and whether or not every hospital met new federal standards for “birthing-friendly” practices. In addition, this 12 months’s methodology rewarded hospitals that tracked and reported the outcomes for sufferers of various races and ethnicities.

“Identifying racial disparities in maternity care is a vital step toward achieving health equity,” Seo mentioned. “The new measures provide expectant parents with many important data points, such as whether hospitals implemented patient safety practices, to assist them in making a decision about where to receive maternity care.”

Overall, the methodology was primarily based totally on goal measures of high quality, similar to cesarean part charges in lower-risk pregnancies, new child complication charges, unique breast milk feeding charges, and early elective supply charges, U.S. News mentioned. The publication additionally famous a number of limitations to its analysis of maternity care.

The methodology didn’t account for social components, together with structural racism, which can affect hospital efficiency on high quality measures, it famous. Moreover, hospitals that participated within the maternity companies survey should not consultant of all hospitals throughout the nation that present maternity care. Participating hospitals represented 44% of whole annual deliveries nationwide.

“Overall, the hospitals we evaluated tend to have a higher number of deliveries, and are more concentrated in the Northeast U.S. and slightly less concentrated in the South and Midwest, than non-participating hospitals,” U.S. News wrote in detailing its methodology. “Because our methodology focuses on uncomplicated pregnancies, results of this analysis are not generalizable to high-risk obstetrics. Other methodologies may be devised in the future to identify hospitals that excel in managing high-risk pregnancies.”

Following is a listing of states with the best variety of high-performing hospitals, in accordance with this 12 months’s record.

States With the Most High-Performing Hospitals

• California: 48
• North Carolina: 21
• Pennsylvania: 20
• New Jersey: 19
• Wisconsin: 15
• Colorado: 14
• Ohio: 14
• Texas: 14
• Illinois: 12
• Virginia: 12
• Michigan: 10
• Minnesota: 10

The full “Best Hospitals for Maternity Care” record is obtainable here.