North Shore University in Manhasset is Long Island's top-ranked hospital

Four Long Island hospitals are among the top 10 in the New York City metropolitan area and statewide, according to U.S. News & World Report rankings released Tuesday.

North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset was ranked highest on Long Island and fourth overall in the metro area and statewide. NYU Winthrop Hospital in Mineola was ranked seventh in the metro area, Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park eighth, and St. Francis Hospital in Flower Hill 10th.

Stony Brook University Hospital, rated 12th, is the highest-ranked hospital in Suffolk County.

North Shore’s high ranking “reflects how we have tried to bring into the system providers and physicians who really are at the top level, and they’ve built teams that are at the top level, so it reflects the team effort between physicians, nurses and everybody else in the hospital,” said Dr. Mark Jarrett, chief quality control officer for Northwell Health, which runs North Shore.

NYU Winthrop spokesman Ed Keating said the ranking “clearly places us in the forefront in health care on Long Island. It should certainly reassure patients who come to us for help in their time of need.”

The U.S. News rankings of 4,653 hospitals nationwide are based on federal and other data in 16 adult specialty areas, focusing on factors such as death rates, nurse staffing levels, the breadth of patient services, patient evaluations and the opinions of physicians.

U.S. News also ranks the top 50 hospitals nationwide in 16 specialty areas, such as cancer, cardiology and heart surgery, gynecology, orthopedics and urology. North Shore led Long Island hospitals with a national top-50 ranking in nine specialties, followed by Long Island Jewish and NYU Winthrop, which each had six specialties that were nationally ranked.

The U.S. News ratings are among several national rankings and grades of hospitals released annually. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released its “Hospital Compare” rankings in June, and The Leapfrog Group, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that focuses primarily on hospital safety, published its rankings in May.

Keating said NYU Winthrop analyzes data from each ranking organization, along with internal data, to help determine “if there are opportunities to improve in certain areas.”

Dr. Charles Lucore, president of St. Francis, said that because the methodology for each rating organization is different, rankings can differ among surveys. U.S. News, for example, gives less weight to patient safety than does Leapfrog and less emphasis on patient outcomes — such as mortality and readmission rates — than Hospital Compare, he said.

“We value all the ratings and think they supply good information to consumers,” Lucore said. “When making a choice, I would reference them all.”

He noted that St. Francis scores highly on all three recent national surveys, “so you can see that consistency. But you can also see another hospital where there is not that consistency.”

Darren Dopp, a senior vice president at the Healthcare Association of New York State, which represents hospitals statewide, said his organization is uneasy about hospital rankings because “methodologies and results can vary widely and be a source of real confusion for consumers.”

The complexity of health care cannot easily be boiled down to a single ranking, he said. Dopp advises patients to consult with their doctors, family and friends.

Jarrett said although each rating is helpful, Northwell opts to focus on a single one — the federal rankings — in communicating with hospital employees, in part to avoid confusing staff with different results.

In addition, he said, the federal government — whose data Leapfrog and U.S. News also use, along with other metrics — focuses heavily “on outcome measures, like mortality and readmissions” and other categories that Northwell views as critical priorities, and the federal data  are validated through examinations of individual patient medical charts.

One advantage of U.S. News is that it ranks hospitals in specialty areas, he said. The federal government has data on specialties, but no numerical ranking.

Rankings of specialties is important to patients, because they can get an easy-to-understand look at the best hospitals for the type of condition for which they need surgery or other types of treatment, Jarrett said.

“If you’re going in for a joint replacement, you’re not as concerned about how that place does in open heart surgery,” he said.