U.S. News On Boston's 'Best' Hospitals

I used to put a lot more stock in rankings. Then I read, among other things, The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell on the deep flaws in the process of many ranking lists, from cars to colleges, here.

So it's with a house-sized grain of salt and a great big FWIW — for what it's worth — that I'd like to pass along the latest "best hospitals" ratings from U.S. News Media Group, just out today. You can see the full rankings here, and above is a snippet from the top.

Boston.com's health blogger Deborah Kotz, who used to work for U.S. News, explains the rankings here:

The new rankings draw on data from the Best Hospitals national rankings produced in 2010-11. In order to be ranked, the hospitals in each large metro area (with more than one million residents) had to score in the top 25 percent of hospitals in at least one of 16 medical specialties. The scores were based on reputation, death rate, patient safety, and care-related factors like nursing.

Readers, thoughts? Here's one of mine: The way things are going, maybe they should subtract points for excessive costs...?