The study, published in a recent issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, examined the accuracy of the U.S. News & World Report rankings of “America’s best hospitals” in the category of heart and heart surgery.

HCP’s Sharon-Lise Normand, PhD, and colleagues at Yale University studied whether risk-standardized, 30-day mortality rates for patients having a heart attack were lower in the U.S. News hospitals than in the unranked ones. The group determined that, in general, most of the high-ranking hospitals belonged on the list, whereas many that were not on the list deserved to be included. On average, however, the top hospitals did not do much better than the remaining hospitals. Sixteen percent of heart attack patients treated at the U.S. News top hospitals died, compared with 17.9 percent at all the other hospitals.

Among the news coverage of this study are articles in WebMD and Reuters.