Ohio State, Temple lead health systems in social responsibility

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center is the top-ranked health system in the Lown Institute’s 2026 social responsibility index, which grades hospitals and health systems on metrics designed to show how well they perform in the areas of equity, value and outcomes.

Temple Health, a health system in Philadelphia, was second in the Lown health system rankings, which were published today. Lee Health, a four-hospital system in southwestern Florida, was third.

The Lown Institute, an independent think tank in the Boston area that focuses on healthcare quality issues, has published its social responsibility index annually since 2020. The primary focus of the index is individual hospitals. The top three acute-care hospitals in the 2026 version of the index are Methodist Medical Center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Stillwater Medical Center in Stillwater, Oklahoma; and University Health in San Antonio, Texas.

Lown uses Medicare claims, CMS patient safety and patient satisfaction data and Internal Revenue Service filings to assess hospitals and health systems on 52 different measures that fall into the equity, value and outcomes categories. The equity category includes a measure of pay equity that compares CEO compensation to the wages of the housekeeping staff and an inclusivity component that compares the hospital’s patient population to the demographics of the community in which it is located. The value and outcome categories in the Lown index both depend on mortality data, so a hospital that does well in Lown’s value category is also likely to fare well in the outcomes category.

If they are highly rated, many hospitals and health systems trumpet their hospital rankings results to market themselves to prospective patients, insurers and others. The U.S. News and World Report, which has come under some criticism, is the best known of the hospital rankings.

“We wouldn’t have done it [the Lown index] if we thought the U.S. News hospital rankings were exactly what the country needs,” said Vikas Saini, M.D., the institute’s president, in an interview with Managed Healthcare Executive.

Lown has, though, emulated U.S. News by publishing an “honor roll,” which in the Lown’s case includes hospitals and health systems that achieved straight “A” grades in equity, value and outcomes. Eleven (3.3%) of the 331 health systems that Lown ranked made its honor roll, and 123 (4.5%) of the 2,718 acute care hospitals it ranked made the hospital honor roll. Lown noted in a news release about its ranking that just two of the hospitals on U.S. News’ honor roll, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, achieved that status using Lown’s metrics.

In addition to the Ohio State University Wexner, Temple, Lee, Johns Hopkins and Mount Sinai, the six other health systems on the Lown honor roll are Nebraska Medicine in Nebraska, St. Luke’s University Health Network in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Emory Healthcare in Georgia, Covenant Health in Tennessee, the Saint Francis Health System in Oklahoma and the Riverside Health System in Virginia.

Last year, the Duke Regional Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, was the top-ranked hospital on Lown’s social responsibility list as it had been the two years before. This year, it wasn’t among the 123 hospitals on the honor roll. Saini noted that the Duke hospital’s ranking might have been affected by Lown researchers “stripping out” certain costs that aren’t directly related to patient care from its cost efficiency calculations, although he cautioned that it would take additional research to identify definitively the reasons for Duke hospital’s drop in the rankings.

In addition to pay equity and inclusivity, the equity portion of the Lown ranking includes community benefit metrics that measure hospital expenditure on financial assistance, other community health initiatives and service to Medicaid patients. The value measurement is divided between avoiding overuse of low-value care — carotid artery imaging for fainting, for example — and a cost efficiency metric that Lown devised that is calculated as the ratio of the hospital’s mortality rate compared with Medicare costs. The outcomes grade depends on CMS data on hospital mortality, readmission, patient safety (as reflected in rates of pressure ulcers, accidental punctures and central intravenous line infections) and patient satisfaction survey results.

“Our theory of change is that if we can begin to shine a light on some of those aspects of healthcare that don’t get enough attention — but that would benefit from transparency and accountability — that we’re creating an environment that’s enabling of change,” said Saini. “If you’re a citizen, if you’re a legislator, if you’re a policy person, or, for that matter, in the media, and you’re trying to understand how our system works, what’s good, what’s bad, what needs to change, how it could change, all of that — our ranking is meant for that crowd, basically.”