Aspects of health care—scientific challenges, economic disruption, the occasional medical miracle and most of all, what these developments mean for our readers. As part of that commitment, we’ve partnered with Statista Inc., the global market research and

The ranking features the top 200 hospitals in both Oncology and Cardiology and the top 100 in Endocrinology. While global top hospitals are represented in multiple medical fields, leading specialized hospitals that are highly renowned in one or two specific medical fields or treatments also made it into the list in their specialization.

Hospitals which are not accessible to the public and/or are very small were excluded from the ranking since they were very unlikely to receive enough recommendations to make the final list.

The ranking is based solely on peer recommendations for specific areas of expertise from a global survey of medical professionals. Based on the underlying methodology, each list includes a ranking of the 50 best global hospitals, while ranks 51 to 100/200 are sorted alphabetically.

The peer recommendations were collected in two survey waves. First, Newsweek and Statista performed an online survey among tens of thousands of doctors, health care professionals and hospitals managers in over 20 countries. In total, over 40,000 medical experts were invited to participate in the online survey.

The data was collected by Newsweek and Statista during an initial survey period from May to July 2020. The questionnaire did not suggest a list of recommended hospitals, therefore respondents were free to suggest any hospital they deemed recommendable. Self-recommendations were not allowed.

Statista performed plausibility checks on all data to prevent self-nomination. A recommendation score was calculated based on the number of weighted recommendations received.

For the second survey period, Statista asked specialists from the three medical fields to rate a set number of hospitals. The list was comprised of the hospitals which received the highest number of recommendations in the first wave as well as the global top 100 hospitals from Statista/newsweek’s “Worlds Best Hospitals 2020” ranking (there was an overlap between both criteria). Participants were asked to assign a ranking position to these hospitals (Top 1, Top 5, Top 10, Top 20, Top 50, Top 75, Top 100, Top 200). The ranking position was subsequently converted into a ranking score.

Answers were then weighted by the type of respondent by profession, with primary recommendations from doctors in the relevant medical field receiving the highest weight, e.g., cardiologists for cardiology) and by the confidence respondents had in their vote (0-100%). Combined, the two survey periods resulted in over 22,000 individual hospital recommendations.

An overall reputation score (0100%) was calculated for every hospital in every medical field based on the total weighted number of recommendations and the ranking score. The preliminary lists were presented to a global expert board, which serves in an advisory role, for validation. For the full methodology, please visit newsweek.com/wbsh-2021.