Out of 5453 medical centers in the United States examined by an independent research firm, 170 hospitals were ranked in one or more specialties and only 19 of them made it to the honor roll.

The U.S. News & World Report gave the top ranking to John’s Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, followed by Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. While the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles came in at No. 3.

The hospitals were ranked on the basis of six specialty areas which included cancer care, ear, nose, and throat, gastrointestinal disorders, geriatric care, gynecology, and heart and heart surgery.

According to the U.S. News & World Report, the hospitals were judged on a variety of fronts from quality of routine care, surgical volume, registered nurses to bed ratio, handling of “difficult cases across an entire specialty,” to whether they offer care which is “outstanding.”  The other factors that counted were number of medical and surgical discharges, death rate and the hospitals overall reputation.

Veterans’ and military hospitals were not a part of the ranking as data for these was not available.

The 19 top hospitals are:

    * Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore

    * Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.

    * Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles

    * Cleveland Clinic

    * Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston

    * New York-Presbyterian University Hospitals of Columbia and Cornell

    * University of California, San Francisco Medical Center

    * Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston and Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C.

    * Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle

    * Barnes-Jewish Hospital/Washington University, St. Louis

    * University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers, Ann Arbor

    * UPMC-University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

    * Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville

    * Stanford Hospital and Clinics, Stanford, Calif.

    * University of Chicago Medical Center

    * Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles

    * Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Conn.