In recent decades, there’s been a slow but significant shift in the way American health care is organized. Financial, regulatory, and technological forces have all tended to push hospitals and other medical providers into the fold of larger, integrated health systems. According to the American Hospital Association, 68% of U.S. hospitals are now system-affiliated. To address that trend, the 100 Top Hospitals program, which for decades has ranked America’s best-performing hospitals in an effort to drive industry-wide improvement, launched a list that applies the same rigorous analysis to the nation’s growing number of health systems 16 years ago.
For this year’s Fortune/PINC AI 15 Top Health Systems, researchers from PINC AI—the technology platform for the health care company Premier—drew from a study of 355 health systems across the U.S. using publicly available Medicare data. (Systems had to have at least two general, acute care hospitals to be included in the study).
