W hen most people enter a hospital for care—whether it’s for themselves or their loved ones—they have some fairly universal concerns and hopes, says Ilseung Cho, M.D., chief quality officer at NYU Langone Health and associate professor of medicine at NYU: “Probably first and foremost, they don’t want to die; they don’t want to have any bad things happen to them while they’re in the hospital. And they don’t want to have to stay in the hospital any longer than they need to.”

Following that, says Dr. Cho, typically what’s important to patients is to get well enough to leave the hospital. “Outside of, ‘Am I getting better?’ the next most frequent question is, ‘When am I going home?’ They just want to go home and then they don’t want to come back.”

While these goals may seem obvious or simplistic, achieving them for patients is anything but. Addressing these issues requires an intricate and multilayered system of protocols involving frontline staff, administrators, heads of units, building services personnel and many others, all working toward these shared objectives, which are technically categorized as healthcare quality measures, such as mortality, hospital-acquired complications, length of stay and readmissions. These metrics are then used by hospital leaders to assess their facility’s quality of care—where it excels, where it may be falling short and how to improve.

To offer healthcare leaders a benchmark to compare their facility’s metrics with that of their local peers, and to help patients make informed decisions about nearby hospitals, Forbes has launched its first ever list of Top Hospitals By State .

This new state list (on which NYU Langone Health earned a 5-star rating) is drawn from Forbes Top Hospitals 2026 national list and ratings system , which assessed general acute care hospitals across the U.S. To be eligible for the state list, hospitals must have met the criteria for evaluation on the national list, and been given an overall star rating. Then among these hospitals, Forbes identified, on average, the top 30% of hospitals in each state. All hospitals that received an overall rating of 1 or 2 stars on the national list were excluded from the state list, and all hospitals that received an overall rating of 5 stars on the national list were included on the state list. Ultimately, 781 hospitals made our state list, which recognizes an average of 15 hospitals per state. (For the complete state methodology, including full details on the calculations, see below.)

The methodologies for both lists were based on vetted healthcare quality measures from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Provider Data Catalog (PDC) . We focused on 56 best-in-class measures that assess different aspects of healthcare quality and performance—grouped into four pillars (or categories) and assigned weights that ultimately determined each pillar’s impact on a hospital’s overall rating: patient outcomes (55% of the weight), hospital best practices (20%), value (15%) and patient experience (10%).

Another key component of the foundational methodology is that the outcome measures were statistically adjusted for social drivers of health (SDOH) —such as socioeconomics and access to medical services—because SDOH have been shown to impact risk of disease and patient outcomes. By accounting for these SDOH factors—in addition to clinical health risk factors—the ratings were designed to provide a more comprehensive and level comparison of each hospital’s quality, despite differences in hospitals’ locations and patient populations. (For more on the national Top Hospitals 2026 methodology and the calculations that resulted in scores, tiered percentiles and overall star ratings, see the national methodology summary or the full methodology pdf , which lists contributors and advisory panel members.)

The 781 hospitals that landed on our list of Forbes Top Hospitals By State 2026 represent healthcare facilities that have made quality improvement paramount. “Achieving high quality metrics just doesn’t happen by accident,” says Alison Brodginski, D.O., associate chief medical officer and associate chief quality officer at Geisinger Wyoming Valley Medical Center , which earned an overall rating of 5 stars on Forbes Top Hospitals By State list. “It takes not only work, but it has to be a priority of the hospital system because there are a lot of resources that a hospital has to put in place.”

To name just a few of those resources, according to Dr. Brodginski, hospitals must invest in data dashboards, analytics teams and quality experts to analyze patient outcomes and then work with department staffers to make medical protocols and workflows safer and more efficient. There must be time spent training clinicians to code patient charts and ensure that critical patient data is captured accurately. Hospital leaders also need to devote energy to instilling a culture of accountability within units and across departments so that staff can learn from successes and mistakes.

At Geisinger Wyoming Valley Medical Center, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Dr. Brodginski and team have created an infrastructure of dedicated work groups that are responsible for important domains, such as mortality, readmissions, safety of care, patient experience, timeliness and effective care. And the key, she says, is that “every metric has an owner and a team accountable for really moving that metric.” Importantly, though, the teams don’t operate in isolation. The clinical work groups collaborate with the quality and data teams to ascertain which data is most important, and if that data shows movement in a positive direction.

The next vital component to improving healthcare quality is “getting the teams genuinely engaged and excited about the work, and not just compliant,” says Dr. Brodginski. One way that happens at Geisinger is through weekly Friday meetings in which the teams don’t only talk through challenges; Dr. Brodginski also shares positive comments from each week’s hospital survey data and purposefully ends each gathering on this encouraging note to reiterate why the staff’s work toward quality improvement matters so much.

Jack Needleman, Ph.D., professor of health policy and management at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and a member of the Forbes Top Hospitals advisory panel, also emphasizes the importance of including hospital staff when implementing quality improvement practices. “We’ve got a lot of experience identifying evidence-based practices that should improve care, but the challenge is figuring out how to get them into the workflow and sustain them,” he says. “Workflow in hospitals is complex, and nobody understands it the way the frontline staff does. So, if you don’t involve the frontline staff in your quality improvement activities, you will fail at improving quality.”

That’s why Jenny Hopkins, director of quality at St. Luke’s Magic Valley Medical Center , in Twin Falls, Idaho, and St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center in Ketchum, Idaho (which each earned an overall rating of 5 stars), has focused on bringing hospital staff into quality improvement conversations. “We’re really helping them understand what we’re looking at from that quality and safety lens, and how the work they do impacts that,” she says.

In some cases that means explaining to nursing staff why a certain task, like swabbing a patient’s nostrils before surgery, is part of the workflow. The explanation: The medical centers have demonstrated that a quick dab of the nostrils with an antiseptic cotton tip before surgery decreases patients’ risk of developing antibiotic-resistant infections.

In other cases, the quality team collaborates with nursing or operational leaders to look at the data, see what opportunities they have in their areas to improve “and then figure out what are the interventions that we could put in place that might change the outcomes,” says Hopkins. “We’ve found great value in that process because if they’re owning the change and implementing it, there’s just a lot more passion around keeping that going.”

It is, after all, the hospital frontline workers—from the clinical staff to the cleaning staff—who ensure these best practices are carried out every day to prevent harms, keep patients safe and deliver top-notch care. “It really does take everybody to have good quality outcomes in a facility,” notes Hopkins. “It’s not just the clinical staff who are doing that. They contribute a lot, but it’s everybody doing the right thing all the time.”

To see the hospitals in all 50 states (plus Washington, D.C.) that made our list of Forbes Top Hospitals By State 2026, click here .

To produce the list of Forbes Top Hospitals By State 2026, we drew from our national list and ratings system, Forbes Top Hospitals 2026.

  • To be eligible for this inaugural state list, hospitals were required to have earned a Forbes Overall Hospital Quality Rating (FOHQR) on our national list and ratings system.
  • To view a summary of the methodology for our national list and ratings, click here .
  • To view the complete methodology for our national list and ratings, click here .
  • The top 30% of hospitals in each state were identified using the FOHQR percentiles. When calculating the top 30% of hospitals in each state, the percentages that ended in 0.5 and higher were rounded up to the next highest integer. When any hospitals within the top 30% had the same percentile as another hospital in their state, all hospitals with that percentile were included in the Forbes Top Hospitals By State designation.
  • When calculating the top 30% of hospitals in each state, the percentages that ended in 0.5 and higher were rounded up to the next highest integer.
  • When any hospitals within the top 30% had the same percentile as another hospital in their state, all hospitals with that percentile were included in the Forbes Top Hospitals By State designation.
  • Regardless of whether a hospital fell within the top 30% in its state, all hospitals that received an overall rating of 1 or 2 stars on our national list were excluded from our state list, and all hospitals that received an overall rating of 5 stars on our national list were included on our state list.

The number of hospitals awarded after calculating the methodology: 781

The distribution of star ratings on the Top Hospitals By State 2026 list:

3 stars: 17% of hospitals on the list

4 stars: 50% of hospitals on this list

5 stars: 33% of hospitals on this list

Forbes Top Hospitals ratings are not medical advice. They can assist people in learning about different providers, but the ultimate choice for care should be made by the patient or their loved ones in consultation with their medical provider. In any emergency, call 911.

As with all Forbes lists, there is no fee to be considered or selected. For questions about these ratings, please email TopHospitals [@] Forbes.com.