{"doi":"10.1016/j.xkme.2023.100620","title":"Nephrology and the US News and World Report Hospital-Based Specialty Rankings","abstract":"Report(USNWR) published its annual \"Best Hospitals\" and specialties rankings for 2021-2022.Notably, the USNWR removed nephrology as a ranked specialty (Box 1). 1 This significant, first-time instance of dropping a major specialty established a barrier for 37 million Americans living with kidney diseases.Often part of historically disadvantaged populations with low levels of awareness of their conditions, 2 patients with kidney diseases now cannot access information to guide nephrology care decisions.The USNWR did not provide a clear rationale for the change.A new USNWR \"procedure and condition\" of \"kidney failure\" was added (defined by the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, diagnosis of acute kidney failure), and reference was made to overlap with hospital admissions previously attributed to nephrology. 3 Unfortunately, \"kidney failure\" (with a ranking scale of high performing, average, or below average; Box 2) does not adequately capture nephrology care and is confusing to patients.The absence of hospital-based nephrology care rankings stands in stark contrast to rankings for other prevalent, complicated conditions such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.As a team of a patient advocate and 2 nephrologists, we represent others who are concerned about the USNWR's decision to remove nephrology as a ranked specialty.Although the United States strives to advance policies to enhance awareness of kidney disease, transform patient-centered kidney care, and improve health equity, the USNWR's decision hinders these important efforts, impacting vulnerable patient populations at the risk of and living with kidney diseases.The USNWR ranks hospitals and hospital specialties, and although there are methodologic challenges, it provides an important source of information for patients.Hospital rankings are calculated by aggregating specialty performance.As of 2022, there were 3 reputation-only specialties, as determined based on Doximity survey data, and 12 data-driven specialties.The components of the data-driven specialties include the following: 1) Doximity reputation data (27.5%);2) Medicare claims-based outcomes such as 30-day survival after admission (30%) and discharging patients for home after hospitalization (7.5%); 3) data on patient experience from Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (5%); 4) American Hospital Association annual survey data on structural measures (such as hospital volume and nurse staffing); and 5) for certain specialties, public transparency as defined by data sharing in specialty-specific registries.","journal":"Kidney Medicine","year":2023,"id":387913,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.924,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":281083,"name":"Eugene Lin","orcid":"0000-0002-3559-5134","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":366731,"name":"Mallika L. Mendu","orcid":"0000-0002-9345-4516","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":628723,"name":"Curtis Warfield","orcid":"0000-0001-9055-1196","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":9,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:18:13.977537Z","pmid":"36970222","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}