Hospital Rankings

U.S. News has published its annual hospital rankings, and naturally I'm most interested in their rankings for cancer hospitals.

Yale-New Haven, with its brand new Smilow Cancer Hospital, comes in at #24 -- pretty close to (if not exactly -- I can't remember) where they were last year, which is comforting, since it's about 15 minutes from my house.

Just as comforting is the fact that 8 of the top 25 are located within a 6 hour drive of my house: Sloan-Kettering in NYC (#2); Johns Hopkins in Baltimore (#3); Dana-Farber (#5) and Mass General (#7) in Boston; UPenn in Philadelphia (#15); New York Presbyterian (#19); U Maryland in Baltimore (#22); and Yale. That's pretty cool. I don't expect to need any of the other 7 any time soon, but it's nice to know, ya know?

The other thing that struck me about the list this year is how widespread, geographically, these hospitals are. You could probably find one that's about a day's drive for almost anyone in the country. I know this from the support group; nearly everyone there has an option for a second opinion at a great hospital. So in terms of the bigger picture, it's nice that we're doing such a great job as a country in providing access to quality care for so many people.

If we could just work on that "cure" thing now, that would great....