UC San Diego Health Top Ranked in Nation by Vizient

It is with immense pride that we share the news that UC San Diego Health is ranked #1 in California and #3 in the nation as a top performer in the Bernard A. Birnbaum, MD, Quality Leadership annual rankings of more than 100 comprehensive academic medical centers from Vizient Inc., the country’s largest member-driven health care performance improvement organization. As a special point of UC pride, UCLA Health Ronald Reagan and UC Irvine Health also rank in the top 10 nationally at #8 and #9 respectively.

This top performer designation recognizes academic medical centers that demonstrate holistic excellence across multiple service lines, such as cardiac, cancer, neurologic, orthopedic and transplant care, delivering high-quality clinical outcomes based on the Vizient Quality and Accountability ranking system. The ranking helps participating hospitals understand their performance in real-time compared to peers, and identifies structures and processes associated with high performance in quality and safety.

UC San Diego Health excels nationally in measurements of patient centeredness (#5), mortality (#6) and safety (#13). Other significant measures of excellence include equity, effectiveness, and efficiency, representing our comprehensive approach to quality and patient safety.

It is important to note the Vizient rankings are timed to our current performance over the previous 12 months for all patients in our health system. The inclusivity of all patients in the rankings helps us universally evaluate and improve care for all patients, regardless of insurance status. This scorecard is also aligned with the Institute of Medicine’s recommendations for harm reduction, which includes lowering readmissions, infections and falls.

The timeliness of the Vizient rankings make them particularly meaningful because they show we achieved measureable results and improvement during the throes of a global pandemic. Our total picture of safety and quality during COVID-19 is exemplary; our improvement in patient experience, extraordinary. In particular, special efforts were made to improve patient experience through enhanced communication, including additional support for patients who were unable to have visitors, inspirational notecards added to meal trays and proactive electronic communications through MyUCSDChart.

These Vizient results were possible through the tremendous efforts of our stellar faculty and staff for their singular focus on patient outcomes. We would also like to give special recognition to our safety and quality teams that have helped us visualize our progress with meaningful data, analytics and dashboards. By putting data into the hands of our teams, we have been able to focus on and prioritize areas of opportunity for improvement.

For three years in a row, UC San Diego Health has been ranked among the top 10 health systems in the country. It is evidence and validation that our systems, processes and efforts are producing real, measurable progress on the path to high reliability, and even higher rankings in the coming years.